d not dare to ask.

He recalled his first visit to her, not with any maudlin sentimentality,
but with a quiet earnestness: the empty room looking to the river, the
open piano and the music upon it, the few roses, and the books. He
recalled "The Scarlet Letter" bound in white, and her partial quotation
from the Bible in explanation of its binding. Abruptly she had stopped,
perhaps suddenly conscious of the application to herself. At tea she had
said of the cakes that were so good, "I ordered them specially for you
and our little festivity." There was a great simplicity in the words,
and in her voice when she had said them. In her loneliness, a cup of tea
drunk with him was a "festivity." He imagined her sitting alone in that
room in August, when the town is parched, dried up, and half deserted.
How would she pass her days?

He compared his life with hers, or rather with a life he imagined as
hers. And never before had he realized the brightness, even the
brilliance, of his life, with its multitudinous changes and activities,
its work--the glorious sweating with the brown labourers in the sand
flats at the edge of the Fayyum--its sport, its friendships, its
strenuous and its quiet hours, so dearly valued because they were rather
rare. It was a good life. It was almost a grand life. London now,
Scotland presently; then the late autumn, the train, the sight of the
sea, the cry of the siren, the throbbing of the engines, and
presently--Egypt! And then the winter of sunshine, and the songs of his
workmen, his smiling fellahin, and the reclaiming of the desert.

The reclaiming of the desert!

Nigel was alone in his bedroom in the Savoy. It was late at night. He
was in pajamas, smoking a cigar by the open window. He looked down to
the red carpet on which his bare feet were set in their red babouches,
and suddenly he realized the beauty of what he was doing in the Fayyum.
He had never really thought of it before in this way--of the reclaiming
of the desert; but now that he did think of it, he was glad, and his
heart bounded, looking forward in affection to the winter.

And her winter? What would that be like?

What an immense difference one honest, believing, and therefore
inspiring affection must make in a lonely life! Only one--that is
enough. And the desert is reclaimed.

He saw the brakes of sugar-cane waving, the tall doura swaying in the
breeze, where only the sands had been. And his brown cheeks glowed, as a
hot w