amiable boy!

Could all these people read her mind and follow the track of her
distastes and desires, even the dragomans and the donkey-boys? For an
instant she felt as if the stalwart Englishmen, the governing race, whom
she knew so well, were only children--short-sighted and frigid
children--that these really submissive Egyptians, Baroudi, Ibrahim, and
the praying Hamza, were crafty and hot-blooded men with a divinatory
power.

"Your coffee," said Baroudi, handing to her a cup.

She drank a little, put down the cup, and said:

"The first night we were at the Villa Androud your Nubian sailors came
up the Nile and sang just underneath the garden. Why did they do that?"

"Because they are my men, and had my orders to sing to you."

"And Ibrahim--and Hamza?" she asked.

"They had my orders to bring you here."

"Yes," she said.

She was silent for an instant.

"Yes; of course they had your orders."

As she spoke a hot wave of intimate satisfaction seemed to run all over
her. From Alexandria this man had greeted her on the first evening of
her new life beside the Nile. He had greeted her then, and now he had
surely insulted her. He acknowledged calmly that he had treated her as a
chattel.

She loved that.

He had greeted her on that first evening with a song about Allah. Her
mind, moving quickly from thought to thought, now alighted upon that
remembrance, and immediately she recollected Hamza and his prayer, and
she wondered how strong was the belief in Allah of the ruthless being
beside her.

"They sang a song about Allah," she said, slowly. "Allah was the only
word I could understand."

Baroudi raised himself up a little more, and, staring into her face, he
opened his lips, and, in a loud and melancholy voice, sang the violent,
syncopated tune the Nubian boatmen love. The hot yellow rocks around
them seemed to act as a sounding-board to his voice. Its power was
surely unnatural, and, combined with his now expressionless face, made
upon her an effect that was painful. Nevertheless, it allured her. When
he was silent, she murmured:

"Yes, it was that."

He said nothing, and his absolute silence following upon his violent
singing strengthened the grip of his strangeness upon her. Only a little
while ago she had felt, had even known, that she and Baroudi understood
one another as Nigel and she could never understand one another. Now
suddenly she felt a mystery in Baroudi far deeper, far more
impenetra