"Do you remember the night we fled the wrath to come, Gritty—down the hill from the revival tent?"
Gritty put down her knife and fork and burst into a fresh peal of laughter. "I'd clean forgot!" she cried, then gave the older man an account of her frustrated conversion.
"After that we went on strike and refused to go to Sunday-school ever again," she concluded. "Ma hasn't got over it yet."
"The beginning of the end," Mr. Krauss commented.
"Don't you believe it!" Paul corrected. "Gritty's end began the day she was born."
"It never did," she defended, with an air of contentment. "You made me what I am to-day, by preventing me from getting religion—and you know you did, you bad boy. Besides, the moon's up and I gotta see the sphinx."
"What about the nice boy?" Paul inquired.
"He minds his own business," she threw back, as she went away to change her shoes.
A few minutes later she returned, enveloped in a woolly cape. She made Mr. Krauss comfortable before the fire in his bedroom, then followed Paul downstairs.
The night air had a nip in it and Gritty snuggled into the high collar of her cape, passing a hand through a slit to take Paul's arm. They drew away from the hotel gate and walked up the long hill towards the desert, leaving the murmurs and lights of civilization to fade slowly into the distance.
At the top of the hill, where the road spread out and lost itself in the desert, they paused. The first pyramid towered before them, one jagged angle palely silvered by the rising moon, the other side merged into a shadow that extended over acres of sand. Far away, on their left, were tiny points of light leading towards the distant city. On their right was an indigo wilderness of low hills
