d his conversation with Baroudi, energetically, vivaciously,
with an ardour which she had deliberately given him, partly out of
malice, but partly also to gain for herself a longer lease of
tranquillity. For she had spoken the truth. She was drinking Nile water
to-day, and she wanted to drink more deeply.

The river was like a dream, she thought. The great boats, with their
lateen sails and their grave groups of silent brown men, crept
noiselessly by like the vessels that pass in a dream. Against the sides
of the _Loulia_ she heard the Nile water whispering softly, whispering
surely to her. From the near bank, mingling with the loud and nasal song
of the Nubian sailors, rose the fierce and almost tragic songs of the
fellahin working the shadufs. How many kinds of lives there were in the
world!

The blow that had fallen upon Mrs. Armine had made her unusually
thoughtful, unusually introspective, unusually sensitive to all
influences from without; had left her vibrating like a musical
instrument that had been powerfully struck by a ruthless hand. The gust
of fury that had shaken her had stirred her to a fierce and powerful
life, had roused up all her secret energies of temper, of will of
desire, all her greed to get the best out of life, to wring dry, as it
were, of their golden juices every one of the fleeting years. "To-morrow
we die." Those who believe that, as she believed it, desire to live as
no believer in a prolonged future in other worlds can ever desire to
live--here, for the little day--and never had she felt that hungry wish
more than she felt it now. Through her dream she felt it, almost as a
victim of ardent pain feels that pain, without suffering under it, after
an injection of morphia. If she could not have the life to which she had
looked forward of triumph in England, she must have in its place some
other life that suited her special temperament, some other life that
would answer to the call within her for material satisfactions, for
strong bodily pleasures, for the joys of the pagan, the unbeliever, who
is determined to "make the most of" the short span of human life on
earth.

How could she now have that other life with Nigel? He would never be
Lord Harwich. He would never be anything but Nigel Armine, a man of
moderate means interested in Egyptian agriculture, with a badly let
property in England, and a strip of desert in the Fayyum. He would never
be anything except that--and her husband, the man