“I know him,” Kit said. “He’s awfully nice. I’ve got to be back for lunch, and you’re coming down with me, of course. How long can you stay?”
“Just this afternoon. We’re going back on the five forty-five, and catch the night express out of Chicago. If you wait here, I’ll chase after Frank, ’cause he’ll want to have lunch with the Diggs boy, and he can join us later.”
Kit walked along the path which crossed the campus. The coming of Billie unexpectedly, just at a time when she was feeling her first homesickness, struck Kit as a rare piece of luck. But with only five hours to visit with him, she knew it would be all the harder after he had gone. He joined her on a run as she reached the sidewalk, and they hurried down to the Dean’s just in time for lunch. Kit beamed when she introduced her friend from the hills to Della and the Dean.
“Don’t you remember, Uncle Bart,” she asked eagerly, “my talking about Billie? Well, here he is.”
The Dean’s gray eyes twinkled as he surveyed Billie over the tops of his glasses. “You come highly recommended, young man,” he said.
“You could have a lovely time studying over Uncle Bart’s Egyptian Scarabs, Bill,” said Kit. “Weren’t you telling me something about a place in China where they had a whole grove filled with sacred silkworms, Aunt Della? You see, Billie’s main interest is insects and birds.”
Miss Peabody smiled and nodded, looking from one young face to the other. Never before had youngsters sat lunching at that table with her and her brother in quite such a way. The Dean usually took his meals in absolute silence when they were alone together, for he held that desultory conversation disturbed his train of thought. But since Kit’s coming, it had been impossible to check her flow of talk, until now the Dean actually missed it if she happened not to be there.
After lunch they all went into the library to look over the Dean’s newly arrived treasures, the Amenotaph urn and the statue of Annui.
“Well, gol-lee,” exclaimed Kit, as she stood before the plain, squat, terra-cotta urn, “is that the royal urn? I expected to see something enormous, like everything else that is wonderful and ancient in Egypt.”
“My dear,” the Dean replied happily as he bent down to trace the curious, cuneiform markings that circled the urn. “This antedates the time of the Captivity and Moses. I cannot tell positively, until I have opened it and deciphered what I can of the papyrus rolls within. If it should go back to Moses, it will be wonderful. I cannot believe that it is contemporary with Nineveh. Della, you can recall how overjoyed I was when we unearthed that library of precious clay under the Nineveh mounds years ago. Think of reading something which was written by living man several thousand years before that.”