"I'd swear she hasn't."
"Miss Gilder—you're sure she hasn't the slightest suspicion?"
"As sure as a man can be of anything about a woman."
"You aren't trying to evade the question, Duffer?"
"On my word, I'm not. I feel morally certain Miss Gilder labours under the impression that you're as brown as you're painted. That somehow or other you can't be Moslem because she's seen you without a turban, and you've got the hair of a Christian. Maybe she thinks you're a Copt. I heard her learnedly arguing the other day that the Copts are the only real Egyptians. She has the air of studying you, sometimes: but with all her study, she sees you only as an Egyptian of high birth and attainments, with a few drops of European blood in your veins, perhaps just enough to make things aggravating, and a vague right to a princely position if you chose to overlook something or other, and claim it. There you have her conception of you, in a nutshell."
There would still have been room in that nutshell for Cleopatra's ideas concerning her niece's feelings. But if she were right, it was Anthony's business to discover those feelings for himself, provided he cared to do so. And of this I was not sure. There was the doubt that it might be Biddy, even though he appeared to attach some unexplained importance to Miss Gilder's continued ignorance about himself.
The day after leaving Luxor, there was no time for the heart to heart talk I planned with Rachel Guest. Each hour, each minute almost, was taken up with my duties as Conductor, which I was obliged to regard seriously, whether I liked them or not. If I did not, the Set growled, snapped or clamoured; which gave me even more trouble than doing my duty.
For some reason best known to herself (but suspected by me) Mrs. East kept to her suite, nursing a grievance and the Siberian lap-dog from Asiut. This saved me a certain amount of brain strain, for among other places of interest we had to pass near was ancient Hermonthis, where in her Cleopatra incarnation she had built a temple with a portrait of herself adoring the patron Bull of the city. If she had known how easy it would be to visit the ruins, she would have been capable of desiring the boat to stop, or telegraphing complaints to Sir Marcus if it hadn't.
The two excitements of the day were passing through a huge lock (with sides like those of a canyon, and scarlet doors such as might adorn the house of an ogre) in which we nearly stuck, and were saved by Antoun seizing the pole from the inferior hands of a Nubian boatman; also a visit to Esneh, a very Coptic town, starred with convents built by the ever-present Saint Helena, sacred once to the Latos fish, now sacred to gorgeous baskets of every size and colour, also somewhat over-beaded, and over-scarabed. A ruined quay jutted into the wine-brown water, where Roman inscriptions could have been spied out, if any one had had eyes to spare from the basket sellers, the sellers of grape-fruit, and all the other shouting merchants who flocked to head us off on our way to the temple, despite a flurry of rain that freckled the deep sand of the landing hill. But nobody did have eyes for anything Roman, now that Cleopatra sulked in her throne-room, and our only archeologist was as absent-minded as if he had been his own astral body. He had seen the wisdom of "sticking to the trip," and not turning back by train with the Bronsons and Somebody Else, as he may have yearned to do (if Monny were right): but History had suddenly become as dry husks to Sheridan. His soul was no longer with us, journeying up the Nile; and I suspected his body of packing to join it, as soon as things had been arranged to un-Hânem Mabel, and send her, freed from a marriage which was not marriage, freed from this fear or forcible conversion, home to the United States.
It was just on the cards, Anthony and I thought, that there might be another "demonstration" at Esneh, that unruly town where Mohammed Ali banished the superfluous dancing girls of Cairo in the eighteen forties. If Rechid Bey had not discovered the truth about that hurried departure from Luxor for Asiut (as a matter of fact, Mabel and her guardians were almost thrown on board as the train began to move) he might have sent emissaries, or come himself to Esneh, where he must have known the Enchantress Isis would land. As for Bedr and his employers, Anthony (who now knew Biddy's suspicions) was inclined to think that, even if she were right, we had seen the last of them. After such a setback as that in the Temple of Mût, he thought they would not only be discouraged but frightened. They had run away from us, in the temple; and despite the proverb concerning those who fight and run, to fight another day, it was probable that men of their calibre would see the wisdom of abandoning the chase. They had shown themselves cowards, Anthony thought, whatever their object had been in attacking Miss O'Brien and Miss Gilder: and though we must be on the watch during the rest of the trip, his idea was that the men had retreated in fear of arrest.