Through a labyrinth of narrow streets, echoing with native cries and Oriental traffic, a wonderful sight and sensation to strangers unfamiliar with Cairene commercial life, Margaret Lampton found her way to "the home of enchantment," as she afterwards called the Iretons' ancient mansion. It was a native house, typical and expressive of the most resplendent years of the Mameluke rule in Egypt.

A licensed guide, with a brass-lettered number on his arm, in a blue cotton jebba and a scarlet fez, had volunteered to show her the way; it would have been impossible for a stranger to find it alone. The Cairene licensed guides, although they are pests, have their uses.

As Margaret passed under the lintel of the outer door, which led into a quiet courtyard, of Hadassah Ireton's house, a Nubian servant rose from the stone mastaba—the guards' seat—upon which he had been lying half asleep; he conducted her with the silence of a shadow to the gate of the inner or women's courtyard. This courtyard was overlooked by the women's quarters of the house only.

Margaret rather timidly entered the second courtyard. She scarcely knew what to expect. She was certainly not prepared for the vision of beauty which she saw directly the door was opened. She had heard nothing at all of the fantastic beauty of the superb old Mameluke palaces in Cairo; she did not know that the Iretons lived in one.

A fat servant, also a Nubian, but more amply clad the guard at the outer door, rose from a wooden seat, grown grey with age. With the same silence and mystery he conducted Margaret across the courtyard.

Margaret could, of course, only glance at the bewildering beauty of her mediaeval surroundings as she followed the servant, but brief as her vision of it was, it left a never-to-be-forgotten picture in her mind. A vision of coolness and peace, of oriel windows—chamber-windows for unreal people, jealously screened with weather-bleached meshrahiyeh work—and one high balcony, the special feature of the courtyard, a dream of romantic beauty, shaded by the dark leaves of an ancient lebbek tree. It was a vision as dignified as it was touching. It was like a lost piece of a world which had passed away, a lonely cloud which had detached itself from a world of romance and had hidden itself in the heart of a seething city of ugliness and sin.

Surprise temporarily drove from Margaret's mind the object of her visit; it was not until she was seated in the spacious room which overlooked the courtyard, and whose front wall consisted of the meshrahiyeh balcony—it was now Hadassah Ireton's drawing-room—that she was brought face to face with the unusualness of her visit.

The room was beautifully cool, screened as it was by the delicate lace-work. Meshrabiyeh was invented to fill two wants—to screen the windows through which women could look out, without being seen themselves, and to admit fresh air while it excluded the sun. It is a substitute for glass in a warm climate.

Margaret would have liked to have sat for a little time longer to collect her thoughts and to take in the beauty of the room; but that was not to be; the door opened and her hostess entered.

Of all the beautiful pictures which she had seen since she entered the inner courtyard of this mediaeval home, Hadassah Ireton was the most beautiful. She had brought her baby-boy with her; he was just learning to toddle. A sob rose in Margaret's throat, as she saw the fair-haired child beside the tall young mother.

Hadassah had greeted her with the conventional "How do you do?"
Margaret answered it as conventionally.

Hadassah lifted her boy up and held him out to Margaret. "This is my son," she said. "I know he wants to welcome you."

The boy held up his face to be kissed. As he did so, Margaret took him in her arms and held him close to her breast. Hadassah, who had brought him to administer to that very want—a woman's empty arms—went to the balcony and made a pretence of letting in some fresh air and excluding the shaft of sunlight which was coming from one of the small oriels that had been left unclosed.

When she turned to her guest, she saw something very like tears in Margaret's eyes. The child, who did not know the meaning of the word fear or shyness, was speaking to Margaret as if he had known her all his short life.

"He has taken you into his elastic heart," Hadassah said. "Because, if you don't mind me saying so, I think we are rather like one another."

"Oh, no!" Margaret said impulsively, while she blushed. "I'm not like you!"

Her words were expressive of admiration. Hadassah did not pretend to misunderstand them; she was well accustomed to admiration.

"The boy sees the resemblance, I'm sure."

"We have both dark heads and we are both tall," Margaret said laughingly. "But there the likeness ends." She looked at Hadassah's eyes as she spoke and wished that she could believe that she was in the least like her. She had never seen such a beautiful expression in any woman's eyes before. Was she really the Syrian girl whom Michael Ireton had dared to marry?

"Let us sit down," Hadassah said. "But before we begin our talk, I must send Michael to the nursery. I am really so foolish about him—I wanted you to see him." She rang the bell and a pretty Coptic girl in native dress came into the room; the boy went on with her without demur. The girl had looked at Margaret with big brown eyes; they carried her mind back to the portraits of Egyptian women painted in Roman times on the walls of tombs.

"What a good little chap!" Margaret said. "I'm sure he wanted to stay with you. How marked the Coptic type is!—they are the true descendants of the ancient Egyptians, aren't they? He looked so fair beside her."

"Dear little son! He will be perfectly happy with her. He loves everybody and everything. I sometimes wonder if it means a lack of character. He rarely cries, and he sings baby-songs to himself all day long."

"What a darling!" Margaret said. "And how fair!"

"Yes," Hadassah said, "quite English." The words were spoken without malice, but they brought the colour to Margaret's cheeks. Hadassah saw it, and said laughingly, "I was granted my wish—I wanted to have a boy as like my husband as possible. He wanted a girl, I think."

Margaret laid her hand on Hadassah's arm. "Did you mind me writing?" she said. "I hope you didn't think it very odd?" Her voice broke. "I wanted your advice. I knew you and your husband could help me."

"Dear Miss Lampton," Hadassah said, "I'm so glad you wrote, and of course I understood. It's worth while to have suffered oneself, so as to be able to understand and help others in their suffering."

Margaret knew all that the words implied, but with her habitual reserve, she answered as though Hadassah had referred to her cousin's death. The Nationalist plot in which he was implicated had added to the horror which British society in Cairo had openly expressed at Michael Ireton's marriage with a Syrian, who was a cousin of the ill-advised youth.

"Michael told me something of the tragedy," Margaret said. "You must have felt his death terribly."

Margaret's words were conventional, but Hadassah did not miss the sympathy and feeling which lay underneath them.

"I did," Hadassah said. "But the boy would never have been happy—he was one of the pitiful instances you meet in Egypt; of misguided idealists. Girgis had a fine character, but he was fastened upon because of his wealth by the wrong set of the Nationalist party, who misled him and then turned on him and killed him because he wouldn't go as far as they wanted him to go in their horrible outrages. It was a pitiful story, greatly distorted and misinterpreted by the press."

"His death was splendid," Margaret said. "It wiped out all the rest—it proved his real worth."

"Yes," Hadassah said. "Poor Girgis died a hero's death. He was as brave as a lion. But come," she said, "let me hear your news. These things we are talking about are ancient history to everybody but myself, and I never think of them if I can help it. It is better not." She sighed reflectively. "Dear Girgis knows that I can never forget him. He gave me all his fierce young love at a time when it was very precious."

"Ignorance was at the bottom of it all," Margaret said. She was alluding to the behaviour of the British residents in Cairo in respect to Hadassah's marriage. Hadassah understood.

"I have learned to know and realize that," she said. "And, after all, one must pity ignorance. I have got so far that I can actually feel sorry for such narrow minds. As for Michael, he never gave it a thought. If our characters are widened through suffering, I have gained—they have lost. Something fine always leaves our natures when we do or think unkind things—nothing is truer or surer than that."

"Michael always says the same thing," Margaret said eagerly. "He thinks unkind thoughts and uncharitable acts—want of love, in fact—the unpardonable sins."

"Both our men have the same name." Hadassah's eyes smiled. "I like your man so much, if I may say so. He is worth a great deal. We can't expect big things to come to us in a small, mediocre way, can we?"

"I am so glad you like him," Margaret said. "And you believe in him? Your husband believes in him, in his . . ." she hesitated ". . . unpractical mind?" Hadassah's understanding and gentleness made her feel childishly weak. It would have been a relief to give way to weeping. Her nerves were at the point when any rebuke would have braced her sympathy was undoing.

"Why, of course!"

"May I tell you why I came?"

"Will you have some tea first? You are tired!"

"No thanks, really. I had numerous cups of coffee on my way here."

"Then let me hear all you want to tell me. Even if I can't help you, I know how nice it is to talk over one's troubles with another woman. You have lived very much cut off from women's society all these months. Where is Mr. Amory? Did he go into the desert? We haven't heard of him or from him since he spoke to my husband about going off on a long journey. He had a great scheme in his head. He's an odd creature." She laughed. "You and I both like individualities, I think."

"He went into the eastern desert soon after you saw him. I haven't heard from him since he went. His letters may have gone astray. But in the meantime a report has been spread abroad that he has taken a woman with him, a Mrs. Mervill. Have you heard of her?"

"Millicent Mervill? I know her!"

"Well, she is in love with him. You know how beautiful she is. . . ."
Margaret's voice lost its steadiness.

"Yes, and also I know how thoroughly lacking in morals. She is very well-known by this time. Last season she was the fashion; she entertained lavishly. This year she has thrown caution to the winds."

"She certainly has, for she has positively hunted Michael to earth."

"Michael Amory, of all men!" Hadassah's laugh encouraged Margaret; it was so expressive of what she herself felt.

"Yes, I think she is annoyed because. . . ." Margaret paused ". . . well, I can't express what I mean, but Michael isn't that sort. He would be her friend if she would let him, but friendship isn't enough."

"I know what you mean. He certainly isn't that sort, there can be no mistaking that."

Margaret smiled happily. "Then you believe he isn't?"

"Of course! Who doesn't?"

"My brother objects to my name being mixed up in the scandal." Margaret had evaded answering Hadassah's question.

"But what scandal?"

"The reports that are going about that Mrs. Mervill is with him in the desert, that that is why I haven't heard from Mike. Everyone is saying it." Meg's words conveyed an apology for her brother.

"Your brother really believes this, and yet he knows Mr. Amory?"

"Yes. But you mustn't blame him. He has tried not to believe it; he is really awfully good about it all. And I must admit that it looks as if the story was true, but I just know it isn't."

"Of course it isn't!" Hadassah said, almost sharply. "Who spread the report?"

"First it came from the native diggers in the valley, and then my brother heard it from Mr. King. Now lots of people are talking about it, and my brother wants me to go home. . . . I've promised to go if . . ." Margaret paused. "That's why I came to you. I want your advice. If we could only hear from Michael, I know the whole thing would be explained. My brother would do anything he could to help me, but his business ties him and . . ." again she paused and then said hurriedly, "You know what men are—he hates my name being bandied about."

"I'll get my husband to comb out the truth from all these lies." Hadassah put her hand on Margaret's. "You'll laugh at your fears one day."

"If you only knew how thoughtless Michael is about the opinion of the world! If he isn't doing wrong, he never stops to think what construction the world may be putting on his action, nor does he care."

"Personally I think it's the malicious talk of some enemy, or of Mrs. Mervill herself. Can she have intercepted his letters, and spread the report so as to separate you?"

"She may have followed him. If she is with him, she is self-invited."

Hadassah Ireton interrupted her. "Even Mrs. Mervill could scarcely do that!"

"My brother says that I may wait in Cairo until we can find definite proofs one way or another. A letter may come from Michael at any moment. I know it will come if he is all right, but I'm so afraid he is ill—that is really what I came to ask you about."

"You want us to try to find out if he is ill?"

"Yes, if you will, if it is not asking too much. Something keeps on telling me that he is ill, that he is in need of help." Margaret was speaking more earnestly and with less restraint. "I have had queer visions and many presentiments since I lived in the Valley. I seem to be able to see beyond . . . if you know what I mean. They have come true in many instances—it is not mere imagination. But perhaps you have as little belief as I once had in these things?"

"Where ought Mr. Amory to be just now—have you any idea?" Hadassah's voice conveyed the idea to Margaret that the subject was too serious to be spoken of hastily or decisively.

"He ought to have reached his destination, the hills beyond the ruins of Tel-el-Amarna. Did you know the object of his journey?" Margaret spoke nervously, shyly; she shrank from speaking of her lover's belief in the treasure of Akhnaton.

"Yes. He told my husband the twofold reason of his wish to make the journey. He believes in the theory that there is a buried treasure in the hills beyond Tel-el-Amarna, where Akhnaton was buried, and I think he also wanted . . . what shall I say? . . . to find himself—I suppose I must use that hackneyed phrase for want of a better—to find himself in the desert. Wasn't that it?"

"Yes. He is a born wanderer." Margaret said the words dreamily; her thoughts had flown, to the luminous figure of Akhnaton. In this superb mansion, fashioned by Oriental genius and Eastern wealth and imagination, her vision took its place, not unnaturally, in the strange list of things which her eyes had seen or her mind had received during her life in Egypt.

"Will you enjoy a wandering life? Don't you think women like a home?"

"With an intellectual companion any place is home; with a stupid one a palace becomes a wilderness. I have learnt that in the desert, if I have learnt nothing else, I think. Michael could make a real home out of a bathing-machine and a box of books." She laughed. "He is never dull, he doesn't know the meaning of the word bored. His only trouble is that no day is long enough. He'd forget the dimensions of the bathing-machine—it would become to him a beautiful house like this."

"What a wonderful thing love is!" Hadassah said to herself, as she watched Margaret's eyes glow and shine. Her thoughts had transformed her. "A wonderful and beautiful thing! Whatever would the world be without it? And yet there are some people who go through life without the faintest idea of what it really means!"

"What we three have got to do," she said aloud, "is to discover where the wanderer is. The sooner he is found the sooner he can start life in a bathing-box. I agree with you so far that I think it's more than likely that he is ill—not necessarily seriously ill, but ill enough to have been delayed on his journey. Still, that is not the only solution of the problem. His letters may be lying in some native post-office. I've known letters remain for weeks on end in out-of-the-way village post-offices. The official can't read the address; he puts the letter aside until someone comes along who can. It may be sooner, it may be later; they eventually reach their destination."

Margaret smiled. "Michael's writing is not too clear—that may be the cause of the delay."

"My husband has received letters which have been months on a journey which should have taken days. Time means nothing to desert peoples, as you know."

"You have made me feel much happier," Margaret said brightly. She could have kissed the beautiful woman by her side out of sheer gratitude.

For some time longer they discussed the subject more fully and laid their plans.

Suddenly Hadassah said, "Where are you staying in Cairo?"

When Margaret told her the name of her hotel, she said, "You must come to us. We have lots of spare room in this big house, and if you are here we can work together so much better. The hotel is too public. It would really give us great pleasure if you will. I feel sure it would be wiser."

"How kind of you to ask me!" Margaret said. "I am quite a stranger to you! I'd love to come. Michael has told me something about your work among the Copts—indeed, everyone speaks of it, of your new educational scheme and the progress you have made in so short a time. I should like to understand more about it, if I may."

"Perhaps our minds have met many times before, for I think we are scarcely strangers," Hadassah said. "I hope you don't feel towards me as one?"

Margaret looked pleased. "I have heard so much about you, about your work."

"It is very uphill work. You can only hope for very slow results amongst a people who have been scorned and persecuted and rejected for generations and generations. I, as a Syrian, know what social persecution means, so it is my highest ambition to do what little I can, with my husband's help and my father's wealth, to elevate the ideals and the moral standard of the young Coptic girls. You can do nothing, or next to nothing, with the older women. Their characters are formed, their prejudices too deeply-rooted."

"I suppose so. It is the same in India—the women there are the bitterest opponents to the reforms for women. They cling to the suffering and oppression they endure."

"These Copts have absorbed so many of the worst features of the Mohammedan civilization—their superstitions, their domestic customs as regards the women, and a great many of their least desirable religious ceremonies. It is hard, for instance, for a stranger to distinguish between a Christian native's marriage or funeral and a Moslem's—indeed, it is often not easy even if you have a lifelong knowledge of the country. The finest qualities of Islam—and they are many—they have rejected, and for so doing they have suffered unthinkable hardships and persecutions. Bad as things are to-day, they were far, far worse in the days before the British Occupation, when the Christians were at the mercy of the fanatical Moslems."

"It is such a pity that the native Christian population is the one which no one trusts in this country. The Mohammedans are respected, the Copts are despised. I find that, even in connection with my brother's work. The brains and industry of the country seem to belong to the Copts; the honour and reliability to the Moslems."

"I know," Hadassah said. "And that's what my husband and I are fighting against. He wants to prove that the people of any country and of any religion, even the English," Hadassah's eyes twinkled, "will become degraded and untrustworthy in time, if they are persecuted and oppressed. With the Christian element in Egypt, it has been a case of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. If we were to take some Coptic children and Mohammedan children, of the same social grade out here, and had them educated in England as Christians, you would soon see that it is not the Copts who ought to be despised, but their intolerant oppressors and persecutors." Hadassah smiled. "You know, Miss Lampton, how easy it is to be good and strong when one is trusted and loved. Love makes finer, better women of us."

Margaret rose from her seat. "You have done me so much good," she said. "I feel as if my world had been re-made."

"That's splendid!" Hadassah said. "I always try to remember that it is a privilege to suffer. It is one of the divine fires which tests us; suffering links us to the great brotherhood. You wouldn't choose to be outside it. The older we grow the more we realize that it is suffering, not happiness, which makes the whole world kin."

Margaret's silence, which often was more eloquent than other women's speech, told Hadassah that she agreed. Suffering was teaching her its lessons.

"When may we expect you?" Hadassah said. "The sooner the better, don't you think?"

"May I come in a day or two? I have some business to do for my brother—I have promised to see one or two people for him; he is going home very soon." She looked round the hall through which they were passing. "I can't imagine myself ever really living here. It looks as if it had all been created by the wand of some magician for a princess in a fairytale. What a contrast to our hut in the Valley!"

"You like it better than a new house in the European settlement? You think I chose wisely?"

"Of course I do. Who wouldn't?"

"This house costs us no more than a good flat would in the European part of the city, but you have to come through the native quarters to get to it, remember. Many people would object to that."

"I hate the European quarter of Cairo," Margaret said. "It seems to me so vulgar and degenerate. The native quarter is just what it sets out to be, no better and no worse."

"Well, you must come and stay with us—my husband will enjoy showing you the hidden beauties of Cairo. He is devoted to it."

Margaret's ears caught the sound of water. It was coming from a tall fountain which was playing in the centre of the outer hall. Above it was a pendentive roof, richly carved and coloured. A suggestion of turquoise-blue and the gleam of iridescent tiles showed through the clear water in the octagonal basin set in the floor. The jets of water came from a large ball of blue faience resting on the top of a slender spiral column. The fountain was only one of the beautiful features of that Eastern mansion which Margaret noticed as her hostess conducted her to the inner courtyard.

"How enchanting it all is!" Margaret said. "I feel much too prosaic to imagine spending my everyday working hours in it." Her life in the hut seemed better suited to her practical nature.

"I love it," Hadassah said. "And I like its emptiness. That is the native idea. We have tried not to make it look like a mediaeval museum, not to stuff it up with things. It's a great temptation."

"Its sense of space is its greatest charm. There is everything you can possibly want in it, and yet it has none of the absurd knick-knacks and useless lumber of Western houses. My brother and I have learned to do without so much that I don't think we shall ever fall into the sin of overcrowding our rooms again."

Hadassah laughed. "Will you have the courage to burn family relics?—Aunt Maria's uncomfortable ottoman, Aunt Elizabeth's escritoire, which is too small to write at, and Aunt Anne's firescreen with strawberries worked in bead-work?"

"Oh, I know them all," Margaret said. "Just compare them to these beautiful things!"

"Don't forget," Hadassah said, "that you are comparing the things of England's worst period to the things of the finest period in Cairo. If you saw some of the native houses, furnished from the European store in the Ezbekiyeh, you would think Queen Victoria's private apartments at Osborne beautiful," Hadassah's voice expressed her meaning.

"Good-bye," Margaret said laughingly. "It is hard to believe that, but
I take your word for it."

As Margaret walked through the outer courtyard, she kept saying to herself, "So that is the Syrian's daughter, the girl whom the English people rejected and would have none of!"

Freddy had often corrected his sister for her careless use of the word "beautiful." He maintained that few people had ever seen a really beautiful human being. The Greeks idealized their models in their types of Venus and Apollo. Margaret felt that at last she could truthfully tell him that she had seen a beautiful woman, and that that woman was a Syrian, Michael Ireton's "wife out of Egypt."