A woman could keep a poultry-farm till the last trump, and even then never awake to the fact that the same brand of corn is appreciated both by the goose and the gander!
And, sure enough, something happened to decide her grace before the setting of the sun.
CHAPTER XIV
"Oh! for a falconer's voice to lure This tassel gentle back again."
SHAKESPEARE.
Lunch, desultory shopping and tea with friends in Cairo had been the order of the afternoon following the dawn which had found her grace at the window trying to come to a decision about her god-daughter. They were just returning from these festivities and were negotiating the last cross-roads of the Sharia Abbas when a native policeman, waving his arm like a semaphore, stepped into the slowly-moving stream of traffic.
Resulted the usual maelstrom of motors, native vehicles, stray animals and trams, in which tossed the native pedestrian as, agile and vociferous, he slipped in and out of the block, calling loudly upon Allah in his extremity.
"A native wedding, or something," said Damaris, who was driving. "What fun!" then blushed divinely pink.
There was one gorgeous mounted figure in the laughing, happy, tumultuous crowd which came whirling across the road kept clear for it by the police.
Hugh Carden Ali had gone a-hawking in a certain part of the desert near the ancient City of On, where gazelle is sometimes seen and birds are plentiful.