ls drew in the faint but heavy perfume which
she always associated with Baroudi, and now with the whole of the East,
and with all Eastern things.

That racing dromedary had surely carried her through the night from one
world to another. Suddenly she felt tired; she felt that she longed to
lie down upon those great silk cushions, between those coloured walls
of silk that shut out the windy darkness and the sad spaces of the
sands, and to stay there for a long time. The courtesan's lazy,
luxurious instinct drowsed within her soul, and her whole body responded
to this perfumed warmth, to this atmosphere of riches created by the man
before her in the core of desolation.

She sighed, and looked at his eyes.

"And how is Mr. Armeen?" he said, with the faintly ironic inflection
which she had noticed in their first interview alone. "Has he gone out
after the jackal?"

What his intention was she did not know, but he could not have said
anything to her at that moment that would have struck more rudely upon
her sensuous pleasure in the change one step had brought her. His words
instantly put before her the necessity for going presently, very soon,
back to the camp and Nigel, and they woke up in her the secret woman,
the woman who still retained the instincts of a lady. This lady
realized, almost as Eve realized her nakedness, the humiliation of that
rush through the night from one camp to another, the humiliation that
lay in the fact that it was she who sought the man, that he had her
brought to him, did not trouble to come to her. She reddened beneath the
paint on her face, turned swiftly round, bent down, and tried to undo
the canvas flap of the tent. Her intention was to go out, to call
Ibrahim, to leave the camp at once. But her hands trembled and she could
not undo the canvas. Still bending, she struggled with it. She heard no
movement behind her. Was Baroudi calmly waiting for her to go? Some one
must have pegged the flap down after she had come in. She would have to
kneel down on the carpet to get at the fastenings. It seemed to her, in
her nervous anger and excitement, that to kneel in that tent would be a
physical sign of humiliation; nevertheless, after an instant of
hesitation, she sank to the ground and pushed her hands forcibly under
the canvas, feeling almost frantically for the ropes. She grasped
something, a rope, a peg--she did not know what--and pulled and tore at
it with all her force.

Just then the night