The Palace of Darkened Windows | Page 6

wanted to have a look at the
diggings a friend of mine is making at Thebes and several looks at the
dam at Assouan, for I am by way of being an engineer myself--a
beginning engineer."
"You have been up the Nile, then?"
"Yes, I'm just back. Now I'm going to see something of Cairo before I
leave."
"We start up the Nile day after to-morrow," said she.
"The day after--" he stopped.
'Twas ever thus. Fate never did one good turn but she sneaked back and
jabbed him unawares. She was a tricksy jade.
"That's--that's gloomy luck," said Billy, and felt outraged. "Why, how

about that Khedive ball thing?"
"Oh, that's when we come back."
She was coming back, then. Hope lifted her head.
"When will that be?"
"In three weeks. It takes about three weeks to go up to the first cataract
and back, doesn't it?"
"Yes, by boat," he said, adding hopefully, "but lots of people like the
express trains better. They--they don't keep you so long on the way."
"Oh, I hate trains," said she cheerfully.
Three weeks ... Ruefully he surveyed the desolation. "I ought to be
gone by then," he muttered.
A trifle startled, the girl looked up at him. As he was not looking at her,
but staring moodily into what was then black vacancy, her look
lingered and deepened. She saw a most bronzed and hardy looking
young man, tall and broad-shouldered, with gray eyes, wide apart under
straight black brows, and black hair brushed straight back from a wide
forehead. She saw a rugged nose, a likeable mouth, and an abrupt and
aggressive chin, saved somehow from grimness by a deep cleft in the
blunt end of it.... She thought he was a very stirring looking young man.
Undoubtedly he was a very sudden young man--if he meant one bit of
what he intimated.
Feminine-wise, she mocked.
"What a calamity!"
"Yes, for me," said Billy squarely. "You know it's--it's awfully jolly to
meet a girl from home out here!"
"A girl from home----!"

"Well, all America seems home from this place. And I shouldn't be
surprised if we knew a lot of the same people ... You can get a good
line on me that way, you know," he laughed. "Now I went to Williams
and then to Boston Tech., and there must be acquaintances----"
"Don't!" said Arlee, with a laughing gesture of prohibition. "We
probably have thousands of the same acquaintances, and you would
turn out to be some one I knew everything about--perhaps the first
fiancé of my roommate whose letters I used to help her answer."
"Where did you go to school?"
"At Elm Court School, near New York. For just a year."
He shook his head with an air of relief. "Never was engaged to
anybody's roommate there.... But if you'd rather not have my
background painted----"
"Much rather not," said the girl gaily. "Why, half the romance, I mean
the fun, of meeting people abroad is not knowing anything about them
beforehand."
The music was beginning again. Unwillingly the remembrance of the
outer world beat back into Billy's mind. Unhappily he became aware
that the room appeared blackened with young men in evening clothes,
staring ominously his way.
Squarely he stood in front of the girl. "I think this is the encore to our
dance," he told her with a little smile.
She shook her pretty head laughingly at him--and then yielded to his
clasping hands. "But we must dance back to the Evershams," she
demurred. "It is time for us to go to our concert."
But Billy had no intention of relinquishing her before the music ceased.
It was a one step, and it carried them with it in a gaiety of rhythm to
which the girl gave herself with the light-hearted abandon of a romping
child. Her light feet seemed scarcely to brush the floor; the delicate

flush of her cheeks deepened with the stirring blood; her lips parted
breathlessly over white little teeth, and when her eyes, intensely blue,
met Billy's, the smile in them quickened in sparkling radiance. She was
the very spirit of the dance; she was Youth and Joy incarnate. And the
heart behind the white shirt bosom near which her fairy hair was
floating began to pitch and toss like a laboring ship in the very devil of
a sea.
"I think I'll go up the Nile again," said Billy irrelevantly.
She laughed elfishly at him, her head swaying faintly with the rhythm.
"Three weeks," said Billy under his breath, "that's twenty-one days--at
ten dollars a day. Now I wonder how many hours--or moments--that
rash outlay would assure?"
"You miser! You calculating----"
"You have to calculate--when you're an engineer."
"But to be sure spoils the charm! Now I--I do things on impulse."