jarred upon their sense of solemnity. They stood in silence watching
the grotesque procession, with its sun-hats and green veils, as it
passed in the vivid sunshine down the front of the old grey wall.
Above them two crested hoopoes were fluttering and calling amid the
ruins of the pylon.

"Isn't it a sacrilege?" said the Oxford man at last.

"Well, now, I'm glad you feel that about it, because it's how it always
strikes me," Headingly answered with feeling. "I'm not quite clear in
my own mind how these things should be approached--if they are to be
approached at all--but I am sure this is not the way. On the whole, I
prefer the ruins that I have not seen to those which I have."

The young diplomatist looked up with his peculiarly bright smile, which
faded away too soon into his languid, _blase_ mask.

"I've got a map," said the American, "and sometimes far away from
anything in the very midst of the waterless, trackless desert, I see
'ruins' marked upon it--or 'remains of a temple,' perhaps. For example,
the temple of Jupiter Ammon, which was one of the most considerable
shrines in the world, was hundreds of miles away back of anywhere.
Those are the ruins, solitary, unseen, unchanging through the centuries,
which appeal to one's imagination. But when I present a check at the
door, and go in as if it were Barnum's show, all the subtle feeling of
romance goes right out of it."

"Absolutely!" said Cecil Brown, looking over the desert with his dark,
intolerant eyes. "If one could come wandering here alone--stumble upon
it by chance, as it were--and find one's self in absolute solitude in