"And me--when I heard those voices--I stopped breathing," said the girl. "But I shook so--I thought they would think that mummy was coming to life! And the dust--Oh, it was almost beyond my force not to sneeze--" "You'd have sneezed us to Kingdom Come," said Ryder, gayly now. "But I did not," she protested. "I lay there and thought of Hamdi looking down upon me, and my flesh crept.... Oh, it was terrible! And yet it was funny." Funny.... McLean gazed in sardonic astonishment upon the two young creatures with such misguided humor that they found something funny in this appalling business. Flying from palaces ... hiding in tombs ... taking a mummy's place beneath the dusty bandages of the dead ... Funny.... And yet there was laughter in their young eyes when they looked at each other and a curve of astounding amusement in their lips. It touched McLean to wonder. It touched him--queerly--to an odd and aching pain. For he saw suddenly that he was looking upon something deathless and imperishable, yet fragile and fleeting as the breath of time.... They were so young, so absorbed, so oblivious.... He had forgotten Jinny Jeffries. So too,--not for the first time, alas!--had Ryder. Now her clear voice from the doorway made them start. "You might present me, Jack." Ryder turned, so did the girl in the painted case, and her eyes widened with a startled surprise. The doorway had not been within her vision. Jinny was leaning back against the door, her hand behind her on the knob she was to guard, her figure still rigid with astonishment. "I didn't know you--you dug them up--alive," she said with a quiver of uncertain humor. "My dear Jinny, I had for--Miss Jeffries, let me present you to Mademoiselle Delcassé," said Jack gravely. "I know that you met her the day of her reception--" Only in that moment did Jinny place the haunting recollection. "But she was burned--she was killed," she protested, shaken now with excitement. "She was not burned--although there was a fire. The man who called himself her husband pretended she was killed in order to save his pride. For she escaped from him. And he tried to get her back, setting another man, a false father, after her with lying witnesses--Oh, it's a long story!--so I had to hide her in this case." "But Jack, you--why were _you_ hiding her--? Did you get her out?" stammered Jinny. "The night of that reception. You see, I knew she was truly a French girl who had been stolen by Tewfick Pasha and brought up as his daughter--Oh, that's a long story, too! But at McLean's I had happened on the agents who were searching for her from her aunt in France, and so I knew.... And at the reception when I found she hated that marriage I stayed behind and--and managed to get her away,"--thus lightly did Ryder indicate the dangers of that night!--"so she could escape to France." "Oh--France!" said Jinny.