And Armant?"

A sharpness had crept into her lazy voice.

"There are French at Armant, and where the French come the little women
come."

She remembered the pretty little rooms on the _Loulia_. He possessed a
floating house--a floating freedom. At that moment she hated the
dahabeeyah. She wished it would strike on a rock in the Nile and go to
pieces. But he would be floating up the river into the golden south,
while she travelled northwards to a tent in the Fayyum! She could hardly
keep her body still in her chair. She picked up one of the silver boxes,
and tightened her fingers round it.

"Will you take a little more of the rose-leaf jelly?" he asked.

"No, no."

She dropped the box. It made a dry sound as it struck the table.

"I must stay at Armant some days. I have to look after my sugar
interests there."

"Oh--sugar!" she exclaimed. "My husband may think you do nothing but
look after your affairs, but you mustn't suppose a woman--"

"A woman--what?"

"I knew from the first you loved pleasure."

She took up the fan again.

"From the first? When was that?"

"On the _Hohenzollern_, of course."

"And I--I knew--I knew--"

He paused, smiling at her.

"What did you know?"

"Oh, I can understand something of women--when they permit me. And on
the _Hohenzollern_ you permitted me. Did you not?"

"I never spoke to you alone."

"It was not necessary. It was not at all necessary."

"Of course, I know that."

She was burning--her whole body was burning--with retrospective
jealousy, and as she looked at him the flame seemed to be fanned, to
give out more heat, to scorch her, sear her, more terribly. A man like
this, an Eastern, utterly untrammelled, with no public opinion--and at
this moment England, in her thought of it, seemed full of public
opinion; Puritan England--to condemn him or restrain him, in this
climate what must his life have been? And what would his life be?
Something in her shrieked out against his freedom. She felt within her a
pain that was almost intolerable; the pain of a no longer young, but
forcible, woman, who was still brimful of life, and who was fiercely and
physically jealous of a young man over whom she had no rights at all.
Ah, if only she were twenty years younger! But--even now! She leaned her
arms carelessly on the table, and managed to glance into the lid of the
_boite de beaute_ which he had given her. The expression in the eyes
that looked into hers from the lid sta