It Happened in Egypt | Page 2

Antiquités
pronounced the place to be outside Garstang's borders, and it seemed
that luck was coming our way. No one but we two--Fenton and I--had
any inkling of what might lie hidden in the Mountain of the Golden
Pyramid. That was the great secret! Then Fenton had gone to the
Balkans, on a flying trip in every sense of the word. It was only a
fortnight ago--I being then in Rome--that I had had a wire from him in
Salonica saying, "Friends at work to promote our scheme. Meet me on
my return to Egypt." After that, several telegrams had been exchanged;
and here I was on the Laconia bound for the land of my birth, full of
hope and dreams.
For some moments distant Vesuvius had beguiled my thoughts from
the still more distant mountain of the secret, when suddenly a white girl
in a white hood and a long white cloak passed me on the white deck:
whereupon I forgot mountains of reality and dreams. She was one of
those tall, slim, long-limbed, dryad-sort of girls they are running up
nowadays in England and America with much success; and besides all
that, she was an amazing symphony in white and gold against an azure
Italian sea and sky, the two last being breezily jumbled together at the
moment for us on shipboard. She walked well in spite of the blue
turmoil; and if a fair girl with golden-brown hair gets herself up in
satiny white fur from head to foot she is evidently meant to be looked
at. Others were looking: also they were whispering after she went by:
and her serene air of being alone in a world made entirely for her
caused me to wonder if she were not Some One in Particular.
Just then a sweet, soft voice said, close to my ear:
"Why, Duffer, dear, it can't possibly be you!"
I gave a jump, for I hadn't heard that voice for many a year, and
between the ages of four and fourteen I had been in love with it.

"Brigit O'Brien!" said I. Then I grabbed her two hands and shook them
as if her arms had been branches of a young cherry tree, dropping fruit.
"Why not Biddy?" she asked. "Or are ye wanting me to call ye Lord
Ernest?"
"Good heavens, no! Once a Duffer, always a Duffer," I assured her.
"And I've been thinking of you as Biddy from then till now. Only--"
"'Twas as clever a thing as a boy ever did," she broke in, with one of
her smiles that no man ever forgets, "to begin duffing at an early age, in
order to escape all the professions and businesses your pastors and
masters proposed, and go your own way. Are ye at it still?"
"Rather! But you? I want to talk to you."
"Then don't do it in a loud voice, if you please, because, as you must
have realized, if you've taken time to think, I'm Mrs. Jones at present."
"Why Jones?"
"Because Smith is engaged beforehand by too many people. Honestly,
without joking, I'm in danger here and everywhere, and it's a wicked,
selfish thing for me to come the way I have; but Rosamond Gilder is
the hardest girl to resist you ever saw, so I'm with her; and it's a long
history."
"Rosamond Gilder? What--the Cannon Princess, the Bertha Krupp of
America?"
"Yes, the 'Gilded Babe' that used to be wheeled about in a caged
perambulator guarded by detectives: the 'Gilded Bud' whose coming
out in society was called the Million Dollar Début: now she's just had
her twenty-first birthday, and the Sunday Supplements have promoted
her to be the Golden Girl, alternating with the Gilded Rose, although
she's the simplest creature, really, with a tremendous sense of the
responsibility of her riches. Poor child! There she is, walking toward us
now, with those two young men. Of course, young men! Droves of

young men! She can't get away from them any more than she can from
her money. No, she's stopped to talk to Cleopatra."
"That tall, white girl Rosamond Gilder! Just before you came, I was
wondering who she was; and when you smiled at each other across the
deck it sprang into my mind that--that--"
"That what?"
"Oh, it seems stupid now."
"Give me a chance to judge, dear Duffer."
"Well, seeing you, and knowing--that is, it occurred to me you might be
travelling with--the daughter of--your late--"
"Good heavens, don't say any more! I've been frightened to death
somebody would get that brilliant notion in his head, especially as
Monny and her aunt came on board the Laconia only at Monaco. Esmé
O'Brien is in a convent school not thirty miles from there. But that's the
deepest secret. Poor Peter Gilder's fears