low."

"Call me, and I'll come."

As she went down the companion, he leaned over the rail and asked her:

"Who's going to give you your lesson in coffee-making?"

"Hamza," she answered.

And she disappeared.

XXVI

"All the way up the Nile we shall hear the old shaduf songs," Nigel had
said, when the _Loulia_ set sail from Keneh.

As Mrs. Armine went down to meet Hamza, she was aware of the loud voices
of the shaduf men. They came from both banks of the Nile--powerfully
from the eastern, faintly from the western bank soon to be drowned in
the showers of gold from the sinking sun. Yet she could hear that even
those distant voices were calling loudly, that in their faintness there
was violence. And she thought of the fellah's voice that cried to her in
the orange-garden, and how for a moment she had thought of flight before
she had found herself in a prison of prayer. Now she was in another
prison. But even then the inexorable hands had closed upon her, and the
final cry of the fellah had thrilled with a savage triumph. She had
remembered "Aida" that day. She remembered it again now. Then, in her
youth, she had believed that the passion which had wrecked her was the
passion of her life, a madness of the senses, a delirium of the body
which could never be repeated in later years for another object. How
little she had known herself or life! How little she had known the cruel
forces of mature age. That passion of her girlhood seemed to her like an
anaemic shadow of the wolfish truth that was alive in her now. In those
days the power to feel, the power to crave, to shudder with jealousy, to
go almost mad in the face of a menacing imagination, was not full-grown.
Now it was full-grown, and it was a giant. Yet in those days she had
allowed the shadow to ruin her. In these she meant to be more wary. But
now she was tortured by a nature that she feared.

The die was cast. She had no more thought of escape or of resistance.
The supreme selfishness of the materialist, which is like no other
selfishness, was fully alive within her. Believing not at all in any
future for her soul, she desired present joy for her clamorous body as
no one not a materialist could ever desire. If she failed in having what
she longed for now, while she still retained the glow of her Indian
summer, she believed she would have nothing more at all, that all would
be finally over for her, that the black gulf would gape for her and that
she