this our twentieth-century world.

The white steamer, with its silent, pensive reis squatting in the bows with his eternal cigarette, ever watchful of the appearance of the broad grey-green waters, puffed onward around the sudden bend.

To the east, the Arabian Desert—beautiful beyond words, but where, save in a few narrow oases, Nature forbade the habitancy of man—stretched away to the Red Sea and far on into Asia. And to the west, frowning now as though in hatred of the green Nile with its fertility, lay the Libyan Desert, which, with its great mother the Sahara, held so much of Africa in its cruel grasp, and which was as unlovely and repelling as its sister of Arabia was bright and beautiful.

And Egypt—the Egypt of life and fertility, of men and history, tradition, and of modern travel—lay a green and smiling land between the two deserts as a human life lies between the two great eternities before birth and after death; or as a notable writer once put it: as the moment of the present lies between the lost past and the undiscovered future.

Waldron had already dressed, and was lying back in a long deck-chair enjoying a cigarette, and gazing away at the crimson sunset, when a tall, thin-faced man of thirty passed along the deck. He, too, was in the conventional dinner-jacket and black cravat, but to his fellow-travellers he was a mystery, for ever since joining them at Wady, Haifa he had kept himself much to himself, and hardly spoken to anyone.

His name was Henri Pujalet, and he was from Paris. His father, Henri Pujalet, the well-known banker of the Rue des Capucines, had died two years before, leaving to his eldest son his great wealth. That was all that was known of him.

Only Hubert Waldron knew the truth—the secret of Lola’s love.

“Ah, my dear friend!” he cried in his enthusiastic French way as he approached the Englishman. “Well—how goes it?”

“Very well, thanks,” responded the diplomat in French, for truth to tell he had cultivated the stranger’s acquaintance and had watched with amused curiosity the subtle glances which Lola sometimes cast towards him.

The secret lover sank into a chair at the diplomat’s side and slowly lit a cigarette.

He was a good-looking—even handsome—man, with refined and regular features, a smiling, complacent expression, and a small, well-trimmed 

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