"No," Margaret said. "Don't urge me, Mike. I shan't like it. Hadassah, don't you agree with me?—he must never part with it!" She smiled. "I should be terribly afraid if you did, I should think your luck had deserted you. Dearest, do take it—I believe Akhnaton meant you to keep it."
While she spoke she was longing to tell him of the hand which had written, of her message. The words almost passed her lips, but again she refrained, she obeyed her super-senses. She was convinced that Michael, when his blood was up, ran terrible risks, that he was reckless to the verge of folly. She had heard a letter read in the hospital which had been written to a mother about her son. His Colonel had said, "There are some men who will storm hell, there are others who will follow, and there are some who will lag behind. Your son belongs to the first of the three. What he needs to learn is caution and the value in this war of officers as able as himself." Margaret knew that Michael's rash nature needed no encouragement.
Hadassah championed Margaret. "I think you should keep it," she said to Michael, "and give it to Margaret after the war."
They all laughed, not unmirthfully, and yet not happily. "After the war!" they echoed in one voice. "Oh, that wonderful 'after'!"
"That promised land," Michael said. "Never mind—it's coming. The labour and travail of the war will bring forth Liberty. The pains of childbirth are soon forgotten—mothers know how soon, when the infant is at their breast."
Hadassah and Margaret looked at one another. Their eyes said many things; Margaret's were full of pride because Hadassah was hearing from his own lips that Michael was as whole-heartedly in the war as even Freddy could have desired.
She was still fingering and gazing at the wonderful stone. It seemed scarcely more strange to her that it had actually once belonged to the first king who had abhorred war, had once formed a part of his great royal treasury, than the fact that it had played its part in the mystical drama of her life in Egypt. As Michael talked, she questioned herself dreamily. Which was real—her humdrum pantry-maid existence in London, with her dreary walks through darkened streets, with now and then a Zeppelin scare to make her lonely bedroom seem more lonely? Or her life in the Valley, surrounded by the unearthly light of the Theban hills, her life of intellectual excitement and strange intimacy with things and people which the world had forgotten for thousands of years?
Michael felt her abstraction. He put his hand on the top of hers, which held the jewel, and pressed it.
"Come back," he said, laughing. "We're in Clarges Street, and we're going to be married to-morrow."
Meg looked up with startled eyes. "Are we?" she said.