ightness in it,
flickered over his full lips, then died, leaving behind it an impassible
serenity.

That night, just when the moon was coming, the _Loulia_, gleaming with
many lights, passed the garden of the Villa Androud, and soon was lost
in the night, going towards the south.

On the following evening, by the express that went to Cairo, Nigel
started for the Fayyum.

XVI

The _Loulia_ gone from the reach of the river which was visible from the
garden of the Villa Androud; Nigel gone from the house which was
surrounded by that garden; a complete solitude, a complete emptiness of
golden days stretching out before Mrs. Armine! When she woke to that
little bit of truth, fitted in to the puzzle of the truths of her life,
she looked into vacancy, and asked of herself some questions.

Presently she came down to the drawing-room, dressed in a thin coat and
skirt that were suitable for riding, for walking, for sitting among
ruins, for gardening, for any active occupation. Yet she had no plan in
her head; only she was absolutely free to-day, and if it occurred to her
to want to do anything, why, she was completely ready for the doing of
it. Meanwhile she sat down on the terrace and she looked about the
garden.

No one was to be seen in it from where she was sitting. The Egyptian
gardener was at work, or at rest in some hidden place, and all the
garden was at peace.

It was a golden day, almost incredibly clear and radiant, quivering with
brightness and life, and surely with ecstasy. She was set free, in a
passionate wonder of gold. That was the first fact of which she was
sharply conscious. By this time Nigel must be in Cairo; by the evening
he would be in that fabled Fayyum of which she had heard so much, which
had become to her almost as a moral symbol. In the Fayyum fluted the
Egyptian Pan by the water; in the Fayyum, as in an ample and fruitful
bosom, dwelt untrammelled Nature, loosed from all shackles of
civilization. And there, perhaps to-morrow, Nigel would begin making his
eager preparations for her reception and housing--his ardent
preparations for the taking of her "right down to Nature," as he had
once phrased it to her. She touched her whitened cheek with her
carefully manicured fingers, and she wondered, not without irony, at the
strange chances of human life. What imp had taken her by the hand to
lead her to a tent in the Fayyum, in which she would dwell with a man
full of an almost sacred mora