d now Magrib was over, and the first
time of the Moslem's prayer was come.

She wished she need not go, wished it so keenly, so fiercely, that she
was startled by her own desire almost as if it had been a spectre rising
suddenly to confront her. She longed to remain in this lodge in the
wilderness, to be overtaken by the night of the African stars in the
Villa of the Night of Gold. Now she heard again the far-away voice of
the fellah by the shaduf, warning her surely to go. Or was it not,
perhaps, telling her to stay? It was strange how that old, dead passion,
which had metamorphosed her life, returned to her mind in this land. In
its shackles at first she had struggled. But at last she had abandoned
herself, she had become its prisoner. She had become its slave. Then she
was young. She was able to realize how far more terrible must be the
fate of such a slave who is young no longer. Again the fellah cried to
her from the Nile, and now it seemed to her that his voice was certainly
warning her that she must withdraw herself, while yet there was time,
from the hands of El-Islam--while yet there was time!

She had been so concentrated upon herself and her own fears and desires
that, though part of her had been surely thinking of Baroudi, part of
her had forgotten his existence near her. As a factor in her life she
had been, perhaps, considering him, but not as a man in the room behind
her. The outside world, with its garden of dreaming trees, its gleaming
and dying lights, its voices of birds, and more distant voice from the
Nile, had subtly possessed her, though it had not given her peace. For
when passion, even of no high and ideal kind, begins to stir in a
nature, it rouses not only the bodily powers, but powers more strange
and remote--powers perhaps seldom used, or for long quite disregarded;
faculties connected with beauty that is not of man; with odours, with
lights, and with voices that have no yearning for man, but that man
takes to his inner sanctuary, as his special possession, in those
moments when he is most completely alive.

But now into this outer world came an intruder to break a spell, yet to
heighten for the watcher at the window fascination and terror. As the
fellah's voice died away, and Mrs. Armine moved, with an intention
surely of flight from dangerous and inexorable hands, Hamza appeared at
a short distance from her among the orange-trees. He spread a garment
upon the earth, folded his hands befo