Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/124

 Today was English, in which she ought to go well over ninety. Remained only history, which she also loved. Everybody expected her to win the star pin. Cousin Jimmy was intensely excited over it, and Dean had sent her premature congratulations from the top of a pyramid, so sure was he of her success. His letter had come the previous day, along with the packet containing his Christmas gift.

“I send you a little gold necklace that was taken from the mummy of a dead princess of the nineteenth dynasty,” wrote Dean. “Her name was Mena and it said in her epitaph that she was ‘sweet of heart.’ So I think she fared well in the Hall of Judgment and that the dread old gods smiled indulgently upon her. This little amulet lay on her dead breast for thousands of years. I send it to you weighted with centuries of love. I think it must have been a love gift. Else why should it have rested on her heart all this time? It must have been her own choice. Others would have put a finer thing on the neck of a king’s daughter.”

The little trinket intrigued Emily with its charm and mystery, yet she was almost afraid of it. She gave a slight ghostly shudder as she clasped it around her slim white throat and wondered about the royal girl who had worn it in those days of a dead empire. What was its history and its secret?

Naturally Aunt Ruth had disapproved. What business had Emily to be getting Christmas presents from Jarback Priest?

“At least he might have sent you something if he had to send anything,” she said.

“A souvenir of Cairo, made in Germany,” suggested Emily gravely.

“Something like that,” agreed Aunt Ruth unsuspiciously. “Mrs. Ayers has a handsome, gold-mounted glass paper-weight with a picture of the Sphinx in it that her brother brought from Egypt. That battered thing looks positively cheap.”