et a good one, anyhow, and you shall see every temple--go up to
Halfa, if you want to. And now pray for duck with all your might."

He rode away down the sand slope towards the lake, and presently, with
Hamza and the native guide, was but a moving speck in the pallid
distance.

Mrs. Armine watched them from a folding chair, which she made Ibrahim
carry out into the sand some hundreds of yards from the camp.

"Leave me here for a little while, Ibrahim," she said.

He obeyed her, and strolled quietly away, then presently squatted down
to keep guard.

At first Mrs. Armine scarcely thought at all. She stared at the sand
slopes, at the sand plains, at the sand banks, at the wilderness of
tamarisk, at the grey waters spotted with duck, at the little moving
black things that, like insects, crept towards them. And she felt
like--what? Like a nothing. For what seemed a very long time she felt
like that. And then, gradually, very gradually, her self began to wake,
began to release itself from the spell of place, and to struggle
forward, as it were, out of the shattering grip of the silence. And she
burned with indignation in the chill air of the desert.

Why had she let herself be brought, even to spend only three or four
days, to such a place as this? Had she ever had even a momentary desire
to see more solitary places than the place from which they had come?
Where was Baroudi at this moment? What was he feeling, doing, thinking?
She fastened her mind fiercely upon the thought of him, and she saw
herself in exile. Always, until now, she had felt the conviction that
Baroudi had some plan in connection with her, and that quiescence on her
part was necessary to its ultimate fulfilment. She had felt that she was
in the web of his plan, that she had to wait, that something devised by
him would presently happen--she did not know what--and that their
intercourse would be resumed.

Now, influenced by the desolation towards utter doubt and almost frantic
depression, as she came back to her full life, which had surely been for
a while in suspense, she asked herself whether she had not been grossly
mistaken. Baroudi had never told her anything about the future, had
never given her any hint as to what his meaning was. Was that because he
had had no meaning? Had she been the victim of her own desires? Had
Baroudi had enough of her and done with her? Something, that was
compounded of something else as well as of vanity, seemed still to