"No; I have all I came for."
Smiling half mischievously, half maliciously, he turned and left her.
"I wonder what he saw in my face that amused him?"
She walked up to the bureau and examined her own image in the mirror; and there, on her cheeks, were the unmistakable traces of the tears of vexation and disappointment.
"At least he can have no idea of the cause, and that is some comfort, for he is too honorable to open my letters."
But just here a doubt flashed into her mind.
"How do I know that he is honorable? Can any man be worthy of trust who holds nothing sacred, and sneers at all religions? No; he has no conscience; and yet—"
She sighed and went back to her MS., and though for a while St. Elmo Murray's mocking eyes seemed to glitter on the pages, her thoughts ere long were anchored once more with the olive-crowned priestess in the temple at Sais.
CHAPTER XIV.
If the seers of geology are correct in assuming that the age of the human race is coincident with that of the alluvial stratum, from eighty to one hundred centuries, are not domestic traditions and household customs the great arteries in which beat the social life of humanity, linking the race in homogeneity? Roman women suffered no first day of May pass without celebrating the festival of Bona Dea; and two thousand years later, girls who know as little of the manners and customs of ancient Italy, as of the municipal regulations of fabulous "Manoa," lie down to sleep on the last day of April, and kissing the fond, maternal face that bends above their pillows, eagerly repeat: