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The word he did not understand was “hybrid,” but he would not ask its meaning, guessing from the tone in which it was spoken that it was not exactly complimentary. He determined to look it up when he had a chance.

Braunitz’s own English was almost as good as his French, and that was perfect. He enjoyed talking to Tony, and—a circumstance that the latter appreciated—he did not ask unnecessary questions. In his own mind he classed Tony as an unusually forceful specimen of the hotel-child, that modern product which is sprinkled over the tourist routes of the world in the trail of its restless parents, who go to hot places in the winter and cool places in the summer. It chatters and is blasé and has no country of its own.

Tony did not chatter, but he was undemonstrative enough to seem as blasé as any of his kind, and his knowledge of hotels was wide and varied. He had, however, rarely patronised them in such comfort and security as for the next month. They went lazily up the Nile, and then back again to Cairo, and he felt more childish than he had for years. Karnak and Luxor meant pure enjoyment to him, freed as he was from responsibility and from the irritant of his father’s presence which had bitten into his soul as soon as he left babyhood behind—which he had done far too early. He had no love for Braunitz, but he respected him as a powerful and selfish person who paid his way and who was not to be trifled with: he knew that he was no more indispensable to Braunitz than any paper-covered railway novel that is thrown away at the journey’s end; and yet when, at Cairo, he was told that there was no further use for him, he felt as if the bottom had dropped out of his world.

He took it like a stoic. Braunitz looked at him curiously. He had expected something different—not tears, he was too good a judge of character for that, but anger, or perhaps childish bitterness. Perhaps, too, he would have been better