she moved by the wailing of the mourning women nor the chanters
of the Koran. She only said to Fatima when all was over: "It is well; he
is gone from my woe to the mercy of God! Praise be to God!" And she held
her head high in the village still, though her heart was in the dust.

She would have borne her trouble alone to the end, but that she was
bitten on the arm by one of her father's camels the day they were
sold in the marketplace. Then, helpless and suffering and fevered, she
yielded to the thrice-repeated request of Dicky Donovan, and was taken
to the hospital at Assiout, which Fielding Bey, Dicky's friend, had
helped to found.

But Soada, as her time drew near and the terror of it stirred her heart,
cast restless eyes upon the whitewashed walls and rough floors of the
hospital. She longed for the mud hut at Beni Souef, and the smell of the
river and the little field of onions she planted every year. Day by day
she grew harder of heart against those who held her in the hospital--for
to her it was but a prison. She would not look when the doctor came, and
she would not answer, but kept her eyes closed; and she did not shrink
when they dressed the arm so cruelly wounded by the camel's teeth, but
lay still and dumb.

Now, a strange thing happened, for her hair which had been so black
turned brown, and grew browner and browner till it was like the hair of
her mother, who, so the Niline folk said, was descended from the English
soldier-slave with red hair.

Fielding Bey and Dicky came to see her in hospital once before they
returned to Cairo; but Soada would not even speak to them, though she
smiled when they spoke to her; and no one else ever saw her smile during
the days she spent in that hospital with the red floor and white walls
and the lazy watchman walking up and down before the door. She kept her
eyes closed in the daytime; but at night they were always open--always.
Pictures of all she had lived and seen came back to her then--pictures
of days long before Mahommed Selim came into her life. Mahommed Selim!
She never spoke the words now, but whenever she thought them her heart
shrank in pain. Mahommed Selim had gone like a coward into the desert,
leaving her alone.

Her mind dwelt on the little mud hut and the onion field, and she saw
down by the foreshore of the river the great khiassas from Assouan and
Luxor laden with cotton or dourha or sugar-cane, their bent prows hooked
in the Nile mud. She saw again