“In 1899 when we open that sarcophagus,” said Strat, “there is no mummy. It's something of a mystery. I can't hang here much longer, Annie. It's either let go or haul back up.”

“If you let go, you're going to spike yourself on the bedstead. I'll hop down from the sedan chair and move the furniture.”

It didn't work that easily. She broke the arm of the chair by stepping wrong and fell backward onto the mattress. Strat kicked the sedan chair off the bed and fell onto the mattress with her.

She felt his face, every inch of it, to be sure this was her Strat, the one she remembered so vividly, the one she had wanted so very very much. He caught her long hair in his knotted fist and kissed her. “Oh, Annie. Of all the terrible things that happened, the worst was losing your lock of hair. All this time, I have cherished it. And this afternoon, my father threw it into the wind and it vanished in the desert.”

They clung to each other.

“You got away, then?” Annie said to him. “You escaped Dr. Wilmott and all the dangers that pursued you? I never knew. I could only guess and hope.”

“Oh, Annie, it was just so for me. Did you suffer after we parted? Did I behave wrongly? I have agonized over it,” he said. “It was a terrible decision, and so little time in which to make it. But I had to save Katie. You were strong and could survive. Katie was fragile and could not.” He kissed her cheeks and lips, her throat and hair.

Even now he cannot overstep the bounds of propriety, thought Annie.

How she loved him!

“I begged Time to let me see you again, Annie,” he said, feasting his eyes on her. The torch, still lying on the edge of the hole in the upper room, gave a faint shadowy glow to the room. “I climbed to the top of Khufu's Pyramid to ask it, because the natives say that the ghosts of Time are present in the night.” He tightened his embrace.

In his time, a lady was not merely covered with undergarments of lace, silk and satin, but also strapped into corsets, so that the actual form and feel of the lady was unavailable to anybody, including the lady. Surely what his hands told him now of Annie Lockwood was beyond the bounds of propriety. He comforted himself that this was ancient Egypt, however, and for that, she was properly dressed.

“Not only did Time bring us together,” said Strat, “but amid such excitement.”

“If you call being buried alive excitement,” said Annie. “The two of us are supposed to suffocate to death down here. I think there's a famous opera where that actually happens.”

“Aida,” said Strat. “In days gone by I often attended such musical torture.”

They held each other, their tears dampening their close cheeks.