ad lifted up a voice and had cried aloud. And
an answer had come that had been no echo.

In repose there is renewal. When they spoke again the almost avid desire
to make the most of the years that remained to her had grown much
stronger in Mrs. Armine, and there had been born within her one of those
curious beliefs which, it seems, come only to women--the belief that
there was reserved for her a revenge upon a fate, the fate that had
taken from her the possibility of having all that she had married Nigel
to obtain, and the belief that she would achieve that revenge by means
of the man who lay beside her.

XVII

That evening, when Mrs. Armine stepped out of the felucca at the foot of
the garden of the Villa Androud, she did not wait for Ibrahim to help
her up the bank, but hurried away alone, crossed the garden and the
terrace, went to her bedroom, shut and locked the door, lit the candles
on either side of the long mirror that stood in the dressing-room,
pushed up her veil, and anxiously looked at her "undone" face in the
glass.

Had her action been very unwise? Several times that day, while with
Baroudi, she had felt something that was almost like panic invade her at
the thought of what she had done. Now, quite alone and safe, she asked
herself whether she had been a fool to obey Nigel's injunction and to
trust her own beauty.

She gazed; she took off her hat and she gazed again, hard, critically,
almost cruelly.

There came a sharp knock against the door.

"Who is it?"

"_C'est moi, madame!_"

Mrs. Armine went to the door and opened it.

"Come here, Marie!" she said, almost roughly, "and tell me the truth. I
don't want any flattering or any palavering from you. Do you think I
look younger, better looking, with something on my face, or like this?"

She put her face close to the light of the candles and stood quite
still. Marie examined her with sharp attention.

"Madame has got to look much younger here," she said, at length. "Madame
has changed very much since we have been in Egypt. I do not know, but I
think, perhaps, here madame can go without anything, unless, of course,
she is going to be with Frenchmen. But if madame is much in the sun, at
night she should be careful to put--"

And the maid ran on, happy in a subject that appealed to her whole
nature.

Mrs. Armine dined alone and quickly. It was past nine o'clock when she
finished, and went out to sit on the terrace and to smoke her cig