ture.) He was very strange.

He was very strange. She understood and could not understand him. He was
very strange, and full of secret violence in which religion and vice
went hand in hand. And his religion was not canting, nor was his vice
ashamed. The one was as bold and as determined as the other. She seemed
to grasp him, and did not grasp him. Such a failure piques a woman, and
out of feminine pique often rises feminine passion. He was intent upon
her. Yet part of him escaped her. Did he love her? She did not know. She
knew he drove her perpetually on towards greater desire of him. Yet even
that driving action might not be deliberate on his part. He seemed too
careless to plot, and yet she knew that he plotted. Was he now at Aswan
with some dancing-girl of his own people? Not one word had she heard of
him since the day which had preceded the night of the storm when the
ginnee had come in the wind. Abruptly he had gone out of her life. At
their last meeting he had said nothing about any further intercourse.
Yet she knew that he meant to meet her again, that he meant--what? His
deep silence did not tell her. She could only wonder and suspect, and
govern herself to preserve the bloom of her beauty, and, looking at
Ibrahim and Hamza, trust to his intriguing cleverness to "manage things
somehow." Yet how could they be managed? She looked at the future and
felt hopeless. What was to come? She knew that even if, driven by
passion, she were ready to take some mad, decisive step, Baroudi would
not permit her to take it. He had never told her so, but instinctively
she knew it. If he meant anything, it was something quite different from
that. He must mean something, he must mean much; or why was Hamza out
here in the green depths of the Fayyum?

Nigel had gone to Sennoures to order provisions, leaving her to rest
after the journey from Cairo. She got up from the sofa in the
sitting-room tent, which was comfortable in a very simple way but not at
all luxurious, went to the opening, and looked out.

Night had fallen, the stars were out, and a small moon, round which was
a luminous ring of vapour, lit up the sky, which was partially veiled by
thin wreaths of cloud. The densely growing palms looked like dark wands
tufted with enormous bunches of feathers. Among them she saw a light. It
came from a tent pitched at some distance, and occupied by a middle-aged
German lady who was travelling with a handsome young Arab. They had
pass