ith you--quite safe--as one
can only feel when the little bit of sincerity in one is believed in and
trusted."

She spoke quietly, but he felt excitement behind her apparent calm. In
her voice there was an inflexible sound, that seemed to tell him very
clearly it meant what it was saying.

Always across the Nile came the song of the Nubian sailors.

"I'm not surprised that you feel like that," he said.

He stood for a moment considering, then he sat down once more, and began
to speak with a resolution that seemed to be prompted by passion.

"Ruby, to-day I think I was false to myself, because to-day I was false
to my real, my deep-down belief in you. In London I did think you cared
for me as a man, not perhaps specially because I'd attracted you by my
personality, but because I felt how others misunderstood you. It seemed
to me--it seems to me now--that I could answer to a desire in you to
which no one else ever tried, ever wished to answer. The others seemed
to think you only wanted the things that don't really count--lots of
money, luxury, jewels, clothes--you know what I mean. I felt that your
real desire was--well, I must put it plainly--to be loved and not lusted
after, to be asked for something, not only to be given things. I felt
that, I seemed to know it. Wasn't I right?"

"To-night--I don't know," she said.

Her ears were full of the music that wailed and throbbed in the breast
of the night.

"Can't you forgive that one going back on myself after all these days
and--and nights together? Haven't I proved anything to you in them?"

"You have seemed to, perhaps. But men so often seem, and aren't. And I
did think you knew why I had married you."

"Tell me why you married me."

"Not to-night."

"Long ago," he said, and now he spoke slowly, and with a deep
earnestness which suddenly caught the whole of her attention, "Long ago
I loved a girl, Ruby. She was very young, knew very little of the world,
and nothing at all of its beastlinesses. I think I loved her partly
because she knew so little, she was so very pure. One could see--see in
her eyes that they had never looked, even from a distance, on mud, on
anything black. She loved me. She died. And, after that, she became my
ideal."

He looked at her, slowly lifting his head a little. There was a light in
his eyes which for a moment half frightened, half fascinated her, so
nakedly genuine was it--genuine as a flame which burns straight in an
absolutel