ousin Hylda? The
rest are nowhere--there they come from Assouan, Kaid, Nahoum, and the
Nubians. Look at 'em glisten!"

A hundred of Kaid's Nubians in their glittering armour made three sides
of a quickly moving square, in the centre of which, and a little
ahead, rode Kaid and Nahoum, while behind the square-in parade and gala
dress-trooped hundreds of soldiers and Egyptians and natives.

Swiftly the two cavalcades approached each other, the desert ringing
with the cries of the Bedouins, the Nubians, and the fellaheen. They
met on an upland of sand, from which the wide valley of the Nile and its
wild cataracts could be seen. As men meet who parted yesterday, Kaid,
Nahoum, and David met, but Kaid's first quiet words to David had behind
them a world of meaning:

"I also have come back, Saadat, to whom be the bread that never moulds
and the water that never stales!" he said, with a look in his face which
had not been there for many a day. Superstition had set its mark on
him--on Claridge Pasha's safety depended his own, that was his belief;
and the look of this thin, bronzed face, with its living fire, gave him
vital assurance of length of days.

And David answered: "May thy life be the nursling of Time, Effendina.
I bring the tribute of the rebel lions once more to thy hand. What was
thine, and was lost, is thine once more. Peace and salaam!" Between
Nahoum and David there were no words at first at all. They shook hands
like Englishmen, looking into each other's eyes, and with pride of what
Nahoum, once, in his duplicity, had called "perfect friendship."

Lacey thought of this now as he looked on; and not without a sense of
irony, he said under his breath, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian!"

But in Hylda's look, as it met Nahoum's, there was no doubt--what woman
doubts the convert whom she thinks she has helped to make? Meanwhile,
the Nubians smote their mailed breasts with their swords in honour of
David and Kaid.

Under the gleaming moon, the exquisite temple of Philae perched on its
high rock above the river, the fires on the shore, the masts of the
dahabiehs twinkling with lights, and the barbarous songs floating across
the water, gave the feeling of past centuries to the scene. From the
splendid boat which Kaid had placed at his disposal David looked out
upon it all, with emotions not yet wholly mastered by the true estimate
of what this day had brought to him. With a mind unsettled he listened
to