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!"