They sat on the sofa, hand in hand, strangely like their mistresses as they sat in the sitting-room near the suspicious bulldog.
At the end of the story of the dream, Jane Coop rose.
"Thank you, Miss Hobson. I thought my young mistress was dancing. I was hoping she was forgetting a bit, with the music and young folk. There's one thing, I shall know where she has gone to. My dearie wouldn't break her word. Come along." She opened the door and turned and spoke over her shoulder.
"Drat men!" she said briefly and emphatically.
"Yes, drat 'em!" replied Maria Hobson, even more emphatically, as her memory leapt clear across the gulf of years to the time when she had walked out with a certain Sergeant of the Irish Guards.
Jane Coop dropped a curtsey to the gentry and stood just inside the door, up in arms, ready to fight anyone at the first word of condemnation of her young mistress.
"Come over here, Coop, please, and tell me everything you can about Miss Damaris. I have an idea—mind you, I am not sure—that she has gone out alone, and we must be as quick as we can in finding her, because Egypt is no place for a white girl to be running about in by herself."
Jane Coop took up a corner of the big white apron she insisted upon wearing, and pleated it between her fingers as she told her grace everything with a surprising lucidity.
". . . She came in here to fetch her fan, your grace, and in here somewhere she will have left me a message. I've never known my baby to break her word, and I'll look for it, if I may. She'll have written it on a bit of this block and with this pencil. It's been thrown down in a hurry. Miss Damaris is that tidy, she can put her hand on anything she wants in the dark, which is more than most of the slipshod, take-off-your-dress-and-leave-it-there young ladies of the present day could do."
The anxious maid hid her fear in a never-ending, sotto voce invective against the Pharaohs and their descendants down to the present generation, as they all hunted vainly for the bit of paper; then she stood helplessly in the middle of the room and apostrophised the dog: