all the world seems going on
pilgrimage. We too, Ruby!"

Even at Sennoures, when they got down, the station was crowded, and the
air was alive with hymns. Ibrahim met them, and Hamza was outside the
fence with the donkey for Mrs. Armine. He was joining in the singing,
and his long eyes held a flame. But when he saw Mrs. Armine, his voice
ceased, and he looked at her in silence. As she greeted him, she felt an
odd mingled sensation of fear and of relief. He was a link between her
and Baroudi, yet he looked a fatal figure, and she could never rid
herself of the idea that some harm, or threatening of great danger,
would come to her through him.

As they left the station and rode towards the palm-trees, the noise of
the hymns grew less, but even when they came in sight of the tents the
voices of the pilgrims were still faintly audible, stealing among the
wrinkled trunks, through the rich, rankly growing herbage, over the
running waters, to make a faint music of religion about their nomad's
home.

But after sunset the voices died away. The train had carried the
pilgrims towards Cairo, and, trooping among the palm-trees, or along the
alleys of Sennoures, the crowd dispersed to their homes.

And a silence fell over this opulent land, which already Mrs. Armine
hated.

She hated it as a woman hates the place which in her life is substituted
for the place where is the man who has grasped her and holds her fast,
whatever the dividing distance between them.

That night, as she sat in the tent, she saw before her the orange garden
that bordered the Nile, the wild geraniums making a hedge about the
pavilion of bamboo, she heard the loud voice of the fellah by the
shaduf. Was it raised in protest or warning? Did she care? Could she
care? Could any voice stop her from following the voice that called her
on? And what was it in Baroudi that made his summons to her so intense,
so arbitrary? What was it in him that governed her so completely? Now
that he was far away she could ask herself a question that she could not
ask when she was near him.

He was splendid in physique, but so were other men whom she had known
and ruled, not been ruled by. He was bold, perhaps indifferent at
bottom, though sometimes, in certain moments, on the surface far from
indifferent. Others had been like that, and she had not loved them. He
was intensely passionate. (But Nigel was passionate, though he kept a
strong hand upon the straining life of his na