I was with the Burnhams. We were eight in the party. Lucille Burnham (Joe’s sister) and I were betrothed. Betrothed after months and months of playing at love, and the making and unmaking of lovers’ quarrels. Each had thought the other meant nothing more than what makes for an idler’s pastime, until drifting on the current of old Nilus we read the true love in each other’s heart, and the story (old as Egypt is old) was told over again there where it was told centuries before by men and women who loved in the land of the lotus. Joe and his wife, and the Merrills (brother and sister), Colonel Lamar and his pretty daughter, and my dear girl and I. What a happy, care-free party we were! My most precious dreams were coming true; and now I went up and down the earth’s highways as I willed. Under the awning that day I was lying at Lucille’s feet, half-asleep, half-awake and wholly happy. I remember how, just there above Luxor, I noticed two women on the river bank, the dull-blue dress of the one, and the other carrying a water-skin to be filled. A boy, naked and brown-skinned, sprawled in the sand. Moving--slow moving with the current--we came drifting out of that vast land that is old as Time itself reckons age. Then between my vision and the banks beginning the level which reached far and away to the hills beyond, came the shadow of a lateen sail not our own. A dahabeeyeh was slipping by, going against the current. I raised myself on my elbow, and there--unfathomable, dark as Erebus, and gazing out of deep sockets--were the eyes of a man who drew me to him with a power I was unable to resist; a power fearful as---- The thin, sneering lips seemed to whisper the word “Brother!” and “Brother----” I whispered back. * * * * * The sight of that face under the shadow of the lateen sail--like a shadow cast by a carrion bird where it slowly moves above you in the desert--coming as it did, in the midst of my days of love and new-found joy, left me unnerved and wrecked both mentally and physically. “Come, come! this won’t do,” said Joe; “I am afraid you are going to have the fever!” “It is nothing,” I declared, shrinking from his scrutiny, “I----I have these attacks sometimes.” “Who is he? What is he?” I asked myself the question hourly. And there in the silence of those nights under the stars of the East, while we breathed the soft winds blowing across the sands the Pharaohs had trod, the answer came to me: He was my other Half-Self--the twin half of my own Soul. This brother of mine--this being for whom I had a loathing deep and intense--was one in whom there lived an incomplete Soul (a half that was evil through and through) and mine was the other half. I was beginning now to understand. We had been sent into this world with but one Soul between us; and to me had been apportioned the good. But evil or good--good and evil--we were henceforth to be inseparable in our fate.