ain which is characteristic
of the modern Greek in Egypt.

But he had also within him a secret fanaticism that was very old, a
fatalism, obscure, and cruel, and strange, a lack of scruple that would
have revolted almost any Englishman who could have understood it, an
occasional childishness, rather Egyptian than Turco-Egyptian, and a
quick and instinctive subtlety that came from no sunless land.

He prayed, and was a sensualist. He fasted, and loved luxury. He could
control his appetites, and fling self-control to the winds. But in all
that he did and left undone there was the diligent spirit at work of the
man who can persevere, in renunciation even as in pursuit. And that
presence of the diligent spirit made him a strong man.

That he was a strong man, with a strength not merely physical, Mrs.
Armine swiftly realized. He told her of his father and mother, but he
did not tell her of the atmosphere in which he had been brought up. He
told her of his father's large fortune and wide lands, of his own
schemes, what they had brought him, what they would probably bring him
in the future; of certain marvellous _coups_ which he had made by
selling bits of land he had possessed in the environs of Cairo when the
building craze was at its height during the "boom" of 1906. But he did
not tell her of a governing factor in his life--his secret hatred of the
English, originally implanted in him by his father, and nourished by
certain incidents that had occurred in his own experience. He did not
tell her, in more ample detail, what he had already hinted at on the
evening when Nigel had brought him to the villa, how certain Egyptians
love to gratify not merely their vanity and their sensuality, but also
their secret loathing of their masters, by betraying those masters in
the most cruel way when the opportunity is offered to them. He did not
tell her that since he had been almost a boy--quite a boy according to
English ideas--he, like a good many of his smart, semi-cultured,
self-possessed, and physically attractive young contemporaries, had
gloried in his triumphs among the Occidental women who come in crowds to
spend the winters in Cairo and upon the Nile, had gloried still more in
the thought that with every triumph he struck a blow at the Western man
who thought him a child, unfit to rule, who ruled him for his own
benefit, and who very quietly despised him.

Perhaps he feared lest Mrs. Armine might guess at a bitter truth of hi