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Page 7
"You speak," he protested, "from a superficial acquaintance with my
academic accomplishments."
"Are you so very--proficient?"
"I was--I am Phi Beta Kappa," he sadly confessed.
Her laugh rippled out. "You don't look it," she cheered.
"Oh, no, I don't look it," he complacently agreed. "That's the lamp
in the gloom. But I am. I couldn't help it. I was curious about
things and I studied about them and faculties pressed honors upon
me. I am even here upon a semi-learned errand. I 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
fianc� of my roommate whose letters I used to help her answer."
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