your sun."

She sent him a look.

"Is it to be in--or out?" she asked. "The house or the orange-gardens?"

"Which you wish."

But his movement was outwards, and she seconded it with hers.

As they went down the steps the loud voice of a shaduf man came to them
from some distant place by the Nile, reminding her of the great river
which seemed ever to be flowing through her Egyptian life, reminding her
of the narrowness of Upper Egypt, a corridor between the mountains of
Libya and of the Arabian desert. She stood still at the bottom of the
steps to listen. There was a pause. Then the fierce voice was lifted
again, came to them violently through the ordered alleys of lovely
little trees. The first time she had ever seen the man with whom she had
been divorced was at the opera in London. She remembered now that the
opera on that night of fate had been "Aida," with its cries of the East,
with its scenes beside the Nile. And for a moment it seemed to her that
the hidden Egyptian who was working the shaduf was calling to them from
a stage, that this garden of oranges was only a wonderful _decor_. But
the illusion was too perfect for the stage. Reality broke in with its
rough, tremendous touch that cannot be gainsaid, and she walked on in
something that had a strangeness of truth--that naked wonder, and
sometimes terror--more strange than that to be found in the most
compelling art.

And yet she was walking in the Villa Nuit d'Or, a name evidently given
to his property by the child of the gilded ball, a name that might be in
place, surely, on the most stagey stage. She knew that, felt it, smiled
at it--and yet mentally caressed the name, caressed the thing in Baroudi
which had sought and found it appropriate.

"What hundreds and hundreds of orange-trees! We are losing ourselves in
them," she said.

The little house was lost to sight in the trees.

"Where are we going?" she added.

"Wait a moment and you will see."

He walked on slowly, with his easy, determined gait, which, in its
lightness, denoted a strength that had been trained.

"Now to the right."

He was walking on her left. She obeyed his direction, and, turning
towards the Nile, saw before her a high arbour made of bamboo and
encircled by a hedge of wild geranium. Its opening was towards the Nile,
and when she entered it she perceived, far off, at the end of a long
alley of orange-trees, the uneven line of the bank. Just where she saw
it the ground ha