"Yes, it is all later than——" he heard his voice saying, and suddenly he stopped, feeling that to talk here and now and to her of Egyptian kings was a mere profanity, in this temple which his love had built, so much holier than all that had ever been made with hands.
But at his sudden cessation, he saw Joyce withdraw herself a little, instinctively on guard. Bitterly he saw that.
"It is all so woundingly sad," he said, "this eternal glorious moon and sky, looking down on to what in so few years is but ruin and decay. And yet they thought that their houses would endure for ever——"
Joyce instantly recovered her confidence, and flowed to meet him on this.
"Oh, yes, oh yes," she said, "all this month that has been haunting me. I think I hate the moon to-night. It is like some dreadful imperishable governess, always presiding and watching us poor children."
That broke the tension.
"Oh, Mistress Moon," said Craddock laughing. "But she is a governess of remarkable personal attractions...."
Then the last day of their sojourn came. Joyce, immensely reassured by her own mistaken conviction that he was going to speak that night at Karnak, and slightly ashamed of herself, had nothing left of the trouble she had anticipated at Cairo, and with regard to retrospect, that which had also been a conviction to her, though not absolutely vanished, was as remote as the imperishable governess. That day the two companions had settled to spend not in detailed study, for indeed they had gathered a most creditable crop, nor even in farewell visits to shrines, but in a general out-door survey and assimilation of river and temple and desert and sky, a long exposed photograph, so to speak, of panorama to take back to the fogs of a northern February. Soon after breakfast they took ferry over the Nile, and joining their donkeys there, rode straight away from the river, going neither to the right nor left, up the narrow path between fast-rising stretches of lengthening crops, past the two great silent dwellers on the plain, who, looking ever eastward, wait for the ultimate dawn that shall touch mute lips again to song, through the huddled mud-houses of Gûrnak, and up and beyond and out till the level green was left below them, and they met the sand-dried untainted air of the desert. Here on the brow of the sandstone cliffs they dismounted, while Josef bestowed their lunch in a cool shadow of a rock in this thirsty land.
Joyce sat down on this bluff.
"We can't dispose of the flesh-pots of Egypt yet," she said, nodding at the provision basket. "May we sit here a little, Mr. Craddock, and will you let me say my eighteenth dynasty catechism, and then——"