pon the ridge of the
sand, and she sat down on it, and looked again. She did not speak. The
pallor of the twilight began to grow dusky, as if into its yellow grey
and grey white, from some invisible source a shadowy black was
filtering. A cool air stirred, coming from far away where the sands
stretch out towards the Gold Coast. It failed, then came again, with a
slightly greater force, a more definite intention.

Nigel was standing, but presently, as Ruby did not move, he sat down
beside her, and clasped his brown hands round his knees so tightly that
they went white at the knuckles. He stole a glance at her, and thought
that her face looked strangely fixed and stern, almost cruel in its
repose, and he turned his eyes once more towards the Sphinx.

And then he forgot Ruby, he forgot Egypt, he forgot everything except
that greatest creation which man has ever accomplished; that creation
which by its inexorable calm and prodigious power rouses in some hearts
terror and sets peace in some, stirs some natures to aspiration, and
crushes others to the ground with an overwhelming sense of their
impotence, their smallness, their fugitive existence, and their dark and
mysterious fate.

Upon Mrs. Armine the effect of the Sphinx, whatever it might have been
at a less critical moment in her life, at this moment was cruel. The
storm had broken upon her and she faced the uttermost calm. She was the
prey of conflicting forces, wild beasts of which herself was the cage.
And she was confronted by the beast of the living rock which, in its
almost ironic composure, its power purged of passion, did it deign to be
aware of her she felt could only, with a strange stillness, mock her.
She was a believer only in the little life, and here lay the conception
of Eternity, struck out of the stone of the waste by man, to say to her
with its motionless lips, "Thou fool!" And as she had within her
resolution, will, and an unsleeping vanity, this power which confronted
her not only dimly distressed, but angered her. She felt angry with
Nigel. She forgot, or chose not to remember, that the Sphinx was the
wonder of the world, and she said to herself that she knew very well why
Nigel had brought her by night to see it. He had brought her to be
chastened, he had brought her to be rebuked. In the heat of her nervous
fancy it almost seemed to her for a moment as if he had divined
something of the truth that was in her, truth that struck hard at him,
and