In her apartments at the Grand Hotel de Esbekie-yeh in Cairo, a wan-faced girl was looking wearily out over the splendid panorama spread before her. In the heel of the afternoon the level rays of the sun were gilding parti-colored minarets of mosque and palaces with barbaric splendor. In the distance the Shoubrah palaces gleamed even more fairy-like than usual; the Abbasieyeh camps were astir with multi-hued life, and on its frowning rock the distant citadel was a gem in red bronze.

On the bosom of the world's most mysterious river, the brown sails were gleaming like the wings of great birds, and inshore the graceful lateens under the dipping shadoofs were closely folded as they lay at rest. Over beyond Ghizeh loomed the Pyramids which she was to visit on the morrow, the Sphinx in its majesty between. It was fairyland, in truth, the most gorgeous riot of color and mystery in the whole world, and yet she saw it not. The languorous air was heavy almost to oppression with the blended odor of jasmine, orange, citron, and the thousand and one flowers of the myriad gardens, mingled with the reek of the bazaars and the indescribable breath of the Nile. And yet she was all unconscious of it.

For in the nostrils of her introspection there was only the spicy tang of lemonias and sagebrush, and the eyes of her soul saw only a little glade embowered with artemesia and clematis, nestled deep in the forbidding cleft in the Rocky Mountains, many thousand miles away. A glade where lay a dead man with the snarl of baffled hatred petrified on his discolored lips, and another wounded almost to death, his head clasped close to the bosom of a woman whom she should be logically hating as woman was never hated before.

And yet in the heart of her there was only pity for the woman, whose letter lay in her lap. For the hundredth time she read the tear-stained words, feeling a new accession of tenderness at each transcribed sob:

"Yesterday, at the 'horse-shoe bend' in Lost CaÑon, I killed the man called Jasper Matlock, after he had shot Kenneth Douglass from ambush. Mr. Douglass was not injured seriously, but at the time I thought him dead. Somehow I found his revolver in my hands and the man was making a second attempt.

"Mr. Ballard—ah, the great hearts of these westerners—magnanimously sought to shield me from the consequences and publicity. As though all the publicity in the world mattered now.

"I have wronged you, but in one thing only: the lie about your engagement to Ellerslie. That was my doing. In everything else I had the justification of every law of Nature; I loved him far better than you could ever do, and he was logically mine if I could but win him. I was ready and eager to sacrifice all, while you in your pitiful selfishness and egotism turned from the glory laid at your feet and yielded him nothing. Oh, you fool! You poor, weak fool! To deny him even the small assurance of your vain little body, when you should have found, as I did, ecstatic exaltation in letting him trample on my soul.

"Oh! child, in your wealth of possession be generous and give me a little of your kindness, a little of your forgiveness. I have so little, so little of him. I know now that I have never even had his respect, at times barely his tolerance. And, God help me, I loved him so. Can you understand when I say that I love him even the more that he was always greater than the manifold arts I exercised upon him? That all my sacrifices, my tenderness, my adoration gave him out apathetic amusement? I was ever but a toy to divert him from the agony your neglect caused him and any other woman as fair would have sufficed as well.

"To my shame be it said that I knew it all the time; but I was hoping against hope. To-day I go away from here, and from him, forever. He will come to you as certainly as the iron flies to the magnet, and he will be suffering, penitent and purified. My share of him has been the coarse dross of passion that must be skimmed from the crucible of every strong man's hot heart; yours will be the refined gold of his soul's first and last real love. For God's sake, child, play with happiness no more, lest you lose it as I have done.

"In the bitterness of the days to come it would lessen the pain if I thought you could ever come to forgive me. I can see to write no more. Mayhap these tears will in time wash out the stain on my soul. That on my hands I must see forever. It is the visible proof of my atonement, for by it I gave back his life to you."

The paper was wet with her tears as she thrust it into the bosom of her dress. Beside the open window she knelt and prayed for the peace of a troubled soul. But it could never be—this home-coming of her lost love. Her heart, too, was dead; the feet of her idol had crumbled and the glorious fabric of her dreams was dust. The yellow drifting sands of the Libyan desert shimmering before her aching eyes were no more dry and lifeless than the dead love moldering In her heart. Never again would her pulses leap at the sound of his voice or her senses reel at his touch. That was as much a thing of the past as Thebes, Luzor, Karnak and Athor out yonder, a dead thing buried in the ashes of a murdered hope.

Over in the aridity of the eternal desert, where for ages she had watched in contemptuous silence the petty tragedies enacted on the worn old stage of Life by the gibbering puppets who call themselves Man, the woman-breasted Sphinx, touched by the shadow of a passing cloud, smiled cynically into the vacancy of the everlasting East.

Two hours after her carriage had entered the airline avenue from Ghizeh to the Pyramids, the incoming train from Alexandria bore into the composite Bedlam called "Masr el Kahira" a bronzed young American at sight of whom more than one yashmak fluttered eagerly as its dark-eyed owner beamed approval of this handsome giaour. Even the lounging pith-hatted Englishmen nodded their appreciation of this lithe Yankee who so hurriedly bounded up the steps of Shepheard's Hotel and spoke imperiously to the Maitre d' Hotel of that famous hostelry.

Money is everything in Cairo, and Lord Frederick Chillingham of H. R. M. Hussars was open in his admiration of the horsemanship of the newcomer as, a short half-hour afterward, Douglass, mounted on a superb barb, swept out into the square. How he obtained accouterments and that magnificent mount in so short a time is a mystery only known to the smiling factotums who bowed and scraped their enjoyment of one of the most princely douceurs that had ever been lavished upon them.

"Cowboy, b'gad!" drawled the honorable Freddie knowingly to a fair-faced young English girl who was watching the rider with a degree of interest rather distasteful to the stalwart guardsman. "I wonder now where the beggar got that horse. Best looker I've seen in Egypt."

"Best lookers, you mean, Freddie," corrected the girl mischievously; "but how do you know he is a cowboy?"

"By the seat of him," tersely explained the blond giant. "Rides straight up, grips with his thighs, don't know he's got stirrups; and don't need them, either. Those Yankees can ride no end!" he concluded grudgingly. "This one seems to be in a rush!"

But once out on the tawny stretch that lay between him and his heart's desire, Douglass checked the swallow-like flight of that wonderful blue-blood and paced more leisurely along in profound meditation. He was not at all sure of his reception. What was he going to say in pleading to his outraged queen? What God-given words would be vouchsafed him to offer in palliation? He groaned at thought of the hopelessness of it. What had he deserved but her contemptuous scorn!

He licked his lips nervously and a cold sweat broke on his brow despite the stifling heat that beat up in shimmering waves against his face. He fumbled a moment in the bosom of his shirt, and prayed for the second time in many years:

"Oh! Mother, help me!"

Suddenly, to the trained far-seeing eyes sweeping that cheerless waste hungrily, appeared a faint speck of color on one of the sand dunes at the base of the Sphinx. With eyes fixed unwaveringly upon it he put the barb at full speed. What he would do, what he would say—all hesitation dropped away in his fierce desire to look into her eyes once more, to hear that sweet voice again, though it were only to send him hurtling down into the hell of his deserts.

Grace Carter, sitting alone in the carriage, watched listlessly the rest of her party kodaking at a distance the immobile face of the Great Mystery. But she saw them as in a dream and ere long she was looking, with a heart as old and cold and dead as that of the grim Mistress of the Nile, as far and unseeingly into the west as the Sphinx stared into the east.

Before her fast-misting eyes blazed one line in Constance's letter:

"For God's sake, play with happiness no more!"

It would be easy to obey that prayer, she thought bitterly, for never more would happiness come anigh her. Afar in the desert a sand spout flared up, whirled along feverishly for a few minutes, and was gone. She watched it with a strange fascination and muttered brokenly:

"Just like his love, fierce, threatening, grand and evanescent. And yet I was to blame! Oh, why did I ever let him go?"

The twanging of some stringed instrument in one of the Bedouin black tents clustered about the base of the Sphinx woke a long-forgotten chord and she mechanically crooned the words of a song that once wailed a heart misery as great as hers:

Her voice broke and she buried her face in her hands, her form convulsed by a paroxysm of tears. Then to her numbed senses came vaguely another remembrance of the buried past, frantic hoof-beats. For a second she cowered as she had done on that awful day, then she turned with a sigh of relief to welcome, this time, the end of all things. Through her tear-blinded eyes she saw the blue stallion sweeping down upon her but she never flinched. God was going to be kind after all.

But even as the lean head ranged beside her, the foam splattering on her bosom as she involuntarily covered her eyes with her hands, from out of Chaos came a cry:

"Gracie, forgive—!"

Slowly she dropped her hands and stared incredulously. What was this wonder that had come to her in the moment of death? She tottered unsteadily, swaying to and fro like a wind-tossed leaf. As in a fog she saw him there with arms extended, waiting to carry her across the dark ford.

Then, by God's mercy, her brain cleared and she knew.

At the Court of Europe's greatest prince men strive with each other doing honor to the beautiful wife of the new American Ambassador, Anselm Brevoort.

"As good as she is beautiful, God bless her!" was Frederick, Lord Chillingham's enthusiastic eulogy one night when her name was mentioned at the United, and his comrades silently drank her health standing.

"As pure and as cold as the stars above, God bless her!" sighs the silver-haired Ambassador, looking wistfully at her where she sits with her protÉgÉ, little Eulalie Blount, in her lap, patiently explaining that the tail makes all the difference between O and Q.

"I love oo, Tonnie!" lisps the little tot kneeling by her little white bed. And the woman, clasping in her bosom a tiny satin bag containing a common yellow telegraph blank on which are written a few now undecipherable words, looks dry-eyed into the night and wonders.

In the marshal's office at Gunnison, over their cigars and a big-bellied bottle, Red McVey and Ballard are looking reminiscently at a Mauser hanging on the wall.

"I reckon that were thu best jawb yuh evah done, Lew," says the cowboy with much conviction.

Ballard, dropping his eyes unaccountably, hesitates long over his selection of a fresh weed.

"What the hell else was there to do?" he says gruffly. But the recording angel, looking kindly and indulgently at the honest face, smiles softly and forgets the pen in his hand.

For a long time the men smoke in a silence more eloquent than words. Then Ballard shifts the threads in the loom.

"That's a great kid that Ken's got, I hear. Think I'll take a pasear over there with you when you go back and look at his points."

"That kid!" says Red enthusiastically. "Say, Lew, hush! He's thu biggest thing on thu range. Why, thu damn leetle cuss actooly kin make fists already, an' he jes' nacherally pre-empts my ole hawg laig every time I goes there. Thu han'le is good to cut his teeths on, Ken says, an' he kin eat it cleah off if he wants. I m thinkin' o leavin my spah gun foh him to nibble on at odd times."

"An' Ken?"

There is a certain diffidence in the sturdy fellow's voice. Red looking at him with a world of reassurance in his laughing blue eyes, grins broadly.

"Hell!" he says succinctly. "Yuh go oveh theah and watch hes eyes follerin' of her. When a man gits through playin' thu goat he gin'rally feels some obligated to act sheep foh a spell, so's to even up thu deal."

Over at the Circle D ranch a broad-shouldered man in flannel shirt and "fair leather" chaparejos lies sprawled on the veranda beside a low-hung hammock in which is lying a brown-haired woman. Pressed to her lips is a spray of mountain heart's-ease, and In her heart is the sweeter ease of mountains removed. The man is dusty and saddle-worn, but in his heart is a great Peace.

Tenderly he lays his lips on the hand shyly touching his bronzed cheek and the woman crimsons with pleasure. For a long time they lie in understanding silence, then the grave rich voice of the man says:

"Tell me, sweetheart, do you never long for the pleasant gayety, the diversions, the distractions of your old social world? Are you really happy and content here in this circumscribed little sphere?"

She slips quickly from the hammock to the floor beside him and draws his head up to her bosom.

"Do I ever long? Yes, sweetheart, I have wept with longing—for the hour of your daily return. I have sighed—for the coming of the dusk that would bring you home to baby and me! I have pined—for the music of the hoof-beats that would thrill me if they passed over my grave."

From the little nursery comes the lusty insistence of a child clamoring for his desires. Very gently she releases herself from his embrace. Then this Madonna of the Range goes proudly to the mothering of her first-born.

Old Abigail, hastening likewise to obey that imperious summons, smiles approvingly as the man, catching at the garment trailing above his face, lays his lips to its hem.

"I kinda reckon," she says softly to herself, "that Belshazzar has come back to stay!"