ay have been shocked, but
Claridge Pasha has every reason to be glad that he helped a fellow-being
in trouble."

"Your maid--Heaver?" asked Eglington in surprise, a swift shadow
crossing his face.

"Yes; she only told me this morning. Perhaps she had seen that Claridge
Pasha was coming to England. I had not, however. At any rate, Quixotism
saved her."

David smiled. "It is better than I dared to hope," he remarked quietly.

"But that is not all," continued Hylda. "There is more. She had been
used badly by a man who now wants to marry her--has tried to do so
for years. Now, be prepared for a surprise, for it concerns you rather
closely, Eglington. Fate is a whimsical jade. Whom do you think it is?
Well, since you could never guess, it was Jasper Kimber."

Eglington's eyes opened wide. "This is nothing but a coarse and
impossible stage coincidence," he laughed. "It is one of those tricks
played by Fact to discredit the imagination. Life is laughing at us
again. The longer I live, the more I am conscious of being an object of
derision by the scene-shifters in the wings of the stage. What a cynical
comedy life is at the best!"

"It all seems natural enough," rejoined David.

"It is all paradox."

"Isn't it all inevitable law? I have no belief in 'antic Fate.'"

Hylda realised, with a new and poignant understanding, the difference of
outlook on life between the two men. She suddenly remembered the words
of Confucius, which she had set down in her little book of daily life:
"By nature we approximate, it is only experience that drives us apart."

David would have been content to live in the desert all his life for
the sake of a cause, making no calculations as to reward. Eglington must
ever have the counters for the game.

"Well, if you do not believe in 'antic Fate,' you must be greatly
puzzled as you go on," he rejoined, laughing; "especially in Egypt,
where the East and the West collide, race against race, religion against
religion, Oriental mind against Occidental intellect. You have an
unusual quantity of Quaker composure, to see in it all 'inevitable
law.' And it must be dull. But you always were, so they say in Hamley, a
monument of seriousness."

"I believe they made one or two exceptions," answered David drily. "I
had assurances."

Eglington laughed boyishly. "You are right. You achieved a name for
humour in a day--'a glass, a kick, and a kiss,' it was. Do you have such
days in Egypt?"

"You must co