t strange,
frail music, even if the hidden player still carelessly made it, she
said, with a sort of brutality:

"And if my husband comes back to camp before my return there?"

"He will not."

"We can't know."

"The dromedary will take you there in fifteen minutes."

"He may be there now. If he is there?"

"Do you wish him to be there?"

He had penetrated her thought, gone down to her desire. That sound of
music, that little cry of some desert lute plucked by demure fingers,
perhaps stained with the henna, the colour of joy, had rendered her
reckless. At that moment she longed for a crisis. And yet, at his
question, something within her recoiled. Could she be afraid of Nigel?
Could she cower before his goodness when it realized her evil? Marriage
had surely subtly changed her, giving back to her desires, prejudices,
even pruderies of feeling that she had thought she had got rid of for
ever long ago. Some spectral instincts of the "straight" woman still
feebly strove, it seemed, to lift their bowed heads within her.

"Things can't go on like this," she said. "I don't know what I wish. But
I am not going to allow myself to be treated as you think you can treat
me. Do you know that in Europe men have ruined themselves for
me--ruined themselves?"

"You liked that!" he intercepted, with a smile of understanding. "You
liked that very much. But I should never do that."

He shook his head.

"I would give you many things, but I am not one of those what the
Englishman calls 'dam fools.'"

The practical side of his character, thus suddenly displayed, was like a
cool hand laid upon her. It was like a medicine to her fever. It seemed
for a moment to dominate a raging disease--the disease of her desire for
him--which created, to be its perpetual companion, a furious jealousy
involving her whole body, her whole spirit.

"Because you don't care for me," she said, after a moment of hesitation,
and again running, almost in despite of herself, to meet her
humiliation. "Every man who cares for a woman can be a fool for her,
even an Eastern man."

"Why do I come here," he said, "two days through the desert from the
Sphinx?"

"It amuses you to pursue an Englishwoman. You are cruel, and it amuses
you."

Her cruelty to Nigel understood Baroudi's cruelty to her quite clearly
at that moment, and she came very near to a knowledge of the law of
compensation.

His eyes narrowed.

"Would you rather I did not pursue you?"