the night far-sighted and
afraid, she had now often the sensation of an untrammelled liberty,
realizing the spaces that lay between her and the Fayyum, seeing no
longer the eyes that asked gifts of her, hearing no longer the voice
that pleaded for graces in her, that she could never make, could never
display, though she might pretend to display them.

And so she sometimes hugged to her breast the spectre of perfect liberty
in the radiant, unclouded mornings when Ibrahim came to tell her it was
time to start, and she heard the low chaunt of the boatmen in the
felucca. If her fate were being bound about her neck, there were moments
when she did not fully realize it, when she was informed by a light and
a heady sensation of strength and of youth, when she thought of the
woman who had sat one day in Meyer Isaacson's consulting-room as of a
weary stranger with whom she had no more to do.

But though Mrs. Armine had moments of exultation in these days, which
she often told herself were her days of liberty, she had also many
moments of apprehension, of depression, of wonder about the future,
moments that were more frequent as she began more fully to realize the
truth of her nature now fiercely revealing itself.

She had never supposed that within her there still remained so strong a
capacity for feeling. She had never supposed it possible that she could
really care for a man again--care, that is, with ardour, with the force
that brings in its train uneasiness and the cruel desire to monopolize,
to assert oneself, to take possession, not because of feminine vanity or
feminine greed, but because of something lodged far deeper among the
very springs of the temperament. She had never imagined that, at this
probably midmost epoch of her life, there could be within her such a
resurrection as that which soon she began to be anxiously aware of. The
weariness, the almost stagnant calm that had, not seldom, beset
her--they sank down suddenly like things falling into a measureless
gulf. Body and mind bristled with an alertness that was not free from
fever.

She said to herself sometimes, trying to play false even with herself,
that the blame, or at least the responsibility, for this change must be
laid on the shoulders of Egypt.

And then she looked, perhaps, at the mighty shoulders of Baroudi. And he
saw the look, and understood her better than she just then chose to say
to herself that she understood herself.

And yet for many