Part 53 (1/2)

”You are pretty good at hating, Meg.”

”Well, Mohammed Ali has since told me where he found her eye of Horus.

Guess where it was.”

Freddy laughed. ”I'm sure I couldn't.”

”She read my diary all the time she was here alone. He says she asked if she might rest and tidy up in my room. He found the eye of Horus just beside the table where she had been reading it. He thinks that it must have caught in the key of the drawer in the table. Probably she thought we were coming and moved quickly away--the ring was easily wrenched open.”

”The little cad!” Freddy said slowly. ”The venomous little toad!”

”In my diary, Freddy, I referred to Michael's strange journey, his journey to King Solomon's Mines, as we always called it.”

Freddy freed himself from his sister's arms and lit a cigarette.

”What a mean little brute! Mohammed Ali was probably in her pay; he told her he had found the eye at the spot where she dismounted.”

”He said he told that lie because Madam made a face at him. He confesses to that.”

Freddy thought for a moment while he smoked, then he said slowly and deliberately: ”If she got that information from your diary, she could easily get more. _Baksheesh_ will make the dead give up their secrets.

That is why Bismarck said to his generals, never tell your own s.h.i.+rt what you want kept a secret. Diaries are dangerous things, Meg.”

”I wrote it in French,” Meg said. ”I thought only the servants would stoop to reading it and they can't read French.”

”Next time, try invisible ink. In Egypt, once a thing is written or told, it is public property.”

”I scarcely write anything now,” she said. ”I feel as if some spy will see it, and the dry bones of a diary never interest me.”

As Freddy was leaving the sitting-room--he was going to bed for a couple of hours before he began work again--Margaret said to him:

”Just tell me before you go, where you first heard the report about Michael, and from whom you heard it.”

”One or two days ago,” he said. ”I heard a smouldering gossip about it going on amongst the workmen. They'd got wind of it somehow. No one ever knows how these things begin. Then I met young King from Professor L----'s camp, and he told me the whole story. He knew Millicent very well. He said she's not what you could call an immoral woman so much as a woman without morals. He confesses he never met anyone in the least like her before, and he rather prides himself on his knowledge of the world--he would have us believe that he has seen a devil of a lot. He wondered at a man of Michael's refined temperament taking her into the desert in the way he has done.”

”He never took her,” Meg said. ”Isn't it hateful, Freddy, hearing people make these a.s.sertions about our Mike?”

”That's what I meant,” Freddy said, ”when I told you that I hated your name being mixed up with his.”

”Oh, that's not what troubles me. No one knows me out here, or my affairs. I meant that it's such a wicked libel on Michael, who's not here to defend himself.”

”But if she's there with him, what can you expect the world to say, to believe?”

”If she followed him and joined him, it wouldn't be very easy to shake her off, would it?”

Freddy smiled. ”You're right there--the fair Millicent wouldn't go because she wasn't wanted!”

”I often ask myself why and how we tolerated her.”

”Did we?” Freddy laughed.

”Well, yes, we did. Even I found myself liking her that day after lunch. I began to wonder if I had always been too hard on her, if I had had my judgment perverted by my jealousy.”