was with
her, did he seem to be anxious about, or even attentive to, what she was
thinking of him. And the completeness of his egoism called from her
egoism respect, as she was forced to realize that he possessed certain
of her own qualities, but exaggerated, made portentous, brilliant,
mysterious, by something in his temperament which had been left out of
hers, something perhaps racial which must be for ever denied to her.

Each day Hamza, the praying donkey-boy, awaited her at some point fixed
beforehand on the western side of the river, and Ibrahim escorted her
there in the felucca, smiling gently like an altruistic child, and
holding a rose between his teeth.

Far up the river the _Loulia_ was moored, between Baroudi's
orange-gardens and Armant, and each day he dropped down the Nile in his
white boat to meet the European woman, bringing only one attendant with
him, a huge Nubian called Aiyoub. The tourists who come to Luxor seldom
go far from certain fixed points. Their days are spent either floating
upon the river within sight of the village and of Thebes, among the
temples and tombs on the western bank, or at Karnak, the temple of
Luxor, in the antiquity shops, or in the shade of the palm-groves
immediately around the brown houses of Karnak and the minarets of
Luxor. Go to the north beyond Kurna, to the south beyond Madinat-Habu,
or to the east to the edge of the mountains that fringe the Arabian
desert, and a man is beyond their ken and the clamour of their gossip.
Baroudi and Mrs. Armine met in the territory to the south, once again
among the mountains, then in the plain, presently under the flickering
shade of orange-trees neatly planted in serried rows and accurately
espaced.

When she started in the morning from the river-bank below the garden,
Mrs. Armine did not ask where she was going of Ibrahim; when she got
upon her donkey did not put any question to Hamza. She just gave herself
without a word into the hands of these two, let them take her, as on
that first day of her freedom, where they had been told, where they had
been paid to take her. As on that first day of her freedom! Soon she was
to ask herself whether part of the creed of Islam was not true for those
beyond its borders, whether, till the sounding of the trumpet by the
angel Asrafil, each living being was not confined in the prison of the
fate predestined for it. But, able to be short-sighted sometimes,
although already in the dark moments of