“It must belong to his wife.”
“But he’s fat, a Dutchman, or German I think. Who ever heard of a slender German housefrau? And these clothes are my size.” She held up a shimmering dream robe. “It’s the strangest thing I ever heard of,” she said when, after five minutes of examining the contents of the bag, she held up a beautiful party dress. “You’d think that my bag had been burned up, contents and all, and that someone, who knew the contents very well, had gone to the trouble of replacing it piece by piece. Every article here is brand new. Only the papyrus roll is missing.”
“It is strange,” her father agreed, “but the ways of enemy spies are past finding out, or, perhaps, he was only an Oriental robber.”
“A thief of Bagdad?”
“Something like that. The roll of papyrus may be quite valuable, worth many thousands. That depends upon the Egyptian dynasty from which it came. Museums pay almost any price for certain rare writings from those ancient times.”
“Why did I accept it?” Mary moaned.
“Why did I encourage you to accept it,” he amended. “Perhaps time will bring the answer. Then again there may be no real answer. Come, let’s get ready for the Persian garden party. We have quite a way to go, and donkeys are slow.
“You didn’t happen to have any secret papers in your traveling bag, did you?” he asked as they rode toward his friend’s garden home.
“None whatever, not even a letter. Sparky keeps all our papers in a secret compartment of the plane. That’s where the papyrus should have been, but who would suppose—”
“That anyone in Persia would be interested in that roll?”