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240 "Oh, well," said Lucia; "it was a glorious day, and we had tea there."

"Fancy!" said Aunt Cathie. "How vivid it all makes it! Fancy having tea on Mount Carmel! 'The hour of the evening sacrifice'—I remember my father once preaching on that text."

The expedition went on to Egypt, and, on seeing an immense photograph of the Great Pyramid, and hearing the date of it, Aunt Cathie most justly observed how it took one back. The Pharaoh of the oppression took one far forward from that, and yet even he was quite at the beginning of the Bible. Explorers had not found any statue of Moses? No? Well, it was hardly to be expected. And the travellers left for Greece.

Aunt Cathie had always particularly wanted to see Greece; she could not say why, unless it was Lord Byron, and Lucia again quivered with inward laughter at the idea of Aunt Cathie and Lord Byron as travelling companions. Oh, how right she had been to get Aunt Cathie to come here! She could picture to herself with great vividness how deplorable she would have found the evening if she had been alone with Edgar. But it was a rich entertainment to observe the two: he delighted to pour out funds of information, historical, geographical, and artistic; she understanding some quite negligible fraction of what he was saying, but ejaculating at intervals, "Dear, how interesting! I had no idea Pericles was as long ago as that. And to think that all these beautiful temples were put up to heathen deities! And you really had lunch on the Areopagus, perhaps on the very place where St. Paul preached; I'm sure I couldn't have eaten a morsel."

All this Lucia drank in with secret glee. But there was very little kindliness or tenderness in her appreciation of it. She saw only the ridiculous side of it, that Aunt Cathie showed this strange but perfectly genuine interest in photographs of places she had never seen and accounts of people whom she had never heard of. But the pathos of it, the humanity of it, in that she, already stumbling in the mists of the grey years, should still be so interested in lives and places so distant from her, so alien to her, quite passed Lucia by. Yet for a moment she envied her aunt, who could feel real pleasure and interest in this dreary recital, so that for many evenings to come, when she sat by her solitary fireside at Fair View, she would try to place this evening among her pleasant reminiscences, and again try to disentangle the Egyptian Thebes from the Thebes in Greece, and place