ch in
strength and force. Yet there was something--something different, that
brought a slight cloud into her eyes. It came to her now, a certain
melancholy in the bearing of the figure, erect and well-balanced as it
was. Once the feeling came, the certainty grew. And presently she found
a strange sadness in the eyes, something that lurked behind all that he
did and all that he was, some shadow over the spirit. It was even more
apparent when he smiled.

As she was conscious of this new reading of him, a motion arrested her
glance, a quick lifting of the head to one side, as though the mind had
suddenly been struck by an idea, the glance flying upward in abstracted
questioning. This she had seen in her husband, too, the same brisk
lifting of the head, the same quick smiling. Yet this face, unlike
Eglington's, expressed a perfect single-mindedness; it wore the look of
a self-effacing man of luminous force, a concentrated battery of energy.
Since she had last seen him every sign of the provincial had vanished.
He was now the well-modulated man of affairs, elegant in his simplicity
of dress, with the dignified air of the intellectual, yet with the
decision of a man who knew his mind.

Lord Windlehurst was leaving. Now David and she were alone. Without
a word they moved on together through the throng, the eyes of all
following them, until they reached a quiet room at one end of the salon,
where were only a few people watching the crowd pass the doorway.

"You will be glad to sit," he said, motioning her to a chair beside some
palms. Then, with a change of tone, he added: "Thee is not sorry I am
come?"

Thee--the old-fashioned simple Quaker word! She put her fingers to her
eyes. Her senses were swimming with a distant memory. The East was in
her brain, the glow of the skies, the gleam of the desert, the swish of
the Nile, the cry of the sweet-seller, the song of the dance-girl,
the strain of the darabukkeh, the call of the skis. She saw again the
ghiassas drifting down the great river, laden with dourha; she saw the
mosque of the blue tiles with its placid fountain, and its handful of
worshippers praying by the olive-tree. She watched the moon rise above
the immobile Sphinx, she looked down on the banqueters in the Palace,
David among them, and Foorgat Bey beside her. She saw Foorgat Bey again
lying dead at her feet. She heard the stir of the leaves; she caught the
smell of the lime-trees in the Palace garden as she fled.