"That _is_ a comfort," she said with pleasant, friendly warmth. "You don't know how horridly responsible I felt! Really, Jack ought to have let me know--but that's Jack all over. He's never grown up." "He's not had much time," returned McLean from the height of his twenty-nine years. "He never will," said Jinny sagely, "not until--well, not until he meets some girl, you know, who will make him feel really responsible." It occurred unhappily to McLean that the girl Jack had been meeting so assiduously of late had certainly not added to his claims to responsibility! Steadily he guarded silence. There are ice fields, on Mont Blanc, where a whisper precipitates an avalanche, and McLean had no intention of starting anything in his friend's slippery field of affairs. "I have spent more time," Miss Jeffries was confiding brightly, for those imperative reasons of her own so obscure to the bewildered young man, "introducing Jack to nice girls--but it never takes! Not seriously. He's a perfectly dear friend, but he doesn't care anything really about girls--and he does need somebody to get him out of his antiquities and his dusty old diggings ... But of course you think I am a sentimental thing!" McLean did not tell her what he thought. He was still fascinatedly engrossed with her revelation of the impeccable Platonic basis of her friendship. His mood of complicated emotion lightened and brightened and at the same time an amazed wonder unfolded its astonishment. He marveled at his friend. To turn to something fantastic, something bizarre--for so he thought of that veiled girl of the harem--when he had this Miss Jeffries for a friend--but probably the young lady herself had never given him the least encouragement. Women are not easily moved to romance for men they have always regarded as brothers and he could see that her feeling for Jack was the warm, honest, sisterly affection of utter frankness. The worse for Jack. For now there seemed no ministering angel to mend his troubled future. It was not only Ryder's troubled future that troubled McLean--it was also Ryder's troubled present. He was very far from easy in his mind about him. After that mystifying performance in the tomb he had not wanted to leave without a frank explanation, but there had been no moment for revelation; Thatcher had hung about them and Hamdi Bey, of all men, had requested a place in McLean's motor for the return to Cairo. And that dinner engagement had pressed. He could have abandoned it for any real reason, but Jack had assured him that there was none. "Get the old devil out of here," had been Jack's furious appeal, referring to Hamdi. "Deny everything to him. Only get him out." And McLean had got him out. The sheik and his followers after a murmurous conference with the bey had galloped off; the police had turned towards their post and Hamdi had accompanied McLean to the nearest village and his waiting motor.