e, though! isn't the
wind cold? It always blows in the winter over these flats. Wrap yourself
well up, darling."

He put up his hand to draw the furs more closely round her. When with
her now he so easily felt protective that he was perpetually doing
little things for her, and he did them with a gentleness of touch that,
coming from a man of his healthy strength and vigour, revealed the
progress made by the inner man in absence.

"I must be your maid," he added.

"But you'll be working and shooting," she said, speaking out of the
depths of her furs in a low voice.

Her face was shrouded in a veil which seemed to muffle her words, and he
only just heard them.

"You come first. I am going to look after you before anything else," he
said.

She pulled up her veil till her lips were free of it.

"But I want your work to come first," she said, speaking with more
energy. "I hate the woman who marries a man because she admires his
character, and who then seeks by every means to change it, to reduce him
from a real man to--well, to a sort of male lady's maid. No, Nigel;
stick to your work, and I'll manage all right."

She felt just then that she could not endure it if he were always intent
on her in the Fayyum. And yet she wished him to be her slave, and she
always wished to be adored by men. But now there was something within
her which might, perhaps, in the fulness of time even get the upper hand
of her vanity.

"We'll see," he answered. "It'll be all right about the work, Ruby. You
see the Pyramids well now."

She looked across the flats to those great tombs which draw the world to
their feet.

"I wish it wasn't so horribly cold," she said.

And Baroudi was away in the gold of the south, and perhaps with the
"Full Moon."

"It won't be half so bad when we get to Mena House. There's always a
wind on this road in winter."

"And in the Fayyum? Will it be cold there?"

"No, not like this. Only at nights it gets cold sometimes, and there's
often a thick mist."

"A thick mist!"

"But we shall be warm and cosy in our tent, and we shall know nothing
about it."

And the _Loulia_ was floating up the Nile into the heart of the gold!
Her heart sank. But then she remembered her resolution in the villa. And
her vanity, and that which a moment ago had seemed to be fighting
against it, clasped hands in resistant friendship.

The victoria rolled smoothly; the horses trotted fast in the brisk air;
the line of the des