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In her agony over the thought of losing him, she was willing to break down the last reserve. But he did not answer the letters. At the same time the thought came to him of going up the Nile in a dahabiyeh. He was bored and had a cold. On the evening of his departure he found her waiting in his rooms. "What do you want?" "Take me along." "How do you know?" "Take me along." She said nothing else.
He put it down to his own mulishness that he had hung on and had learned through the little boy of her removal from the palace. He interrupted himself then with questions, and she told him of her strange trip down the Nile in the dahabiyeh, under guard of the old woman and the Nubian. "But how did you come?" she demanded. "Well, I just swung on to the same train he was in," said Billy.
She did not understand this new move, she had been bewildered ever since that early dawn, on Sunday, when the old woman and the eunuch had rushed her into the limousine, driven her swiftly through the empty streets to a landing place on the river beyond the bridge, and hurried her on board this little boat, an old dahabiyeh reconstructed and given a new engine.
Real Southern palms, she mused guiltily, not those conjured up by opium. That he was solicitous for her health the nature of his schemes revealed. They were to visit Switzerland, and proceed thence to a villa which he owned in Italy. Christmas they would spend in Cairo, explore the Nile to Assouan in a private dahabiyeh, and return home via the Riviera in time to greet the English spring.
Baldwin, of Rome, Italy, who has an international reputation as a specialist on diseases of the heart. A new acquaintance was Mr. Theodore M. Davis, of Newport, Rhode Island, who from November to April, on his finely appointed dahabiyeh, makes the Nile his home, at Luxor.
In physical well-being one sinks down, and with wide eyes one gazes and listens and enjoys, and thinks not of the morrow. The dahabiyeh her very name, the Loulia, has a gentle, seductive, cooing sound drifts broadside to the current with furled sails, or glides smoothly on before an amiable north wind with sails unfurled.
They moved with the last effort of complete exhaustion. In the drooping head and dragging wings of each was written utter weariness, abject fatigue. For a moment they hovered over the dahabiyeh and above the two young lovers, and then, like tired travellers who had reached their journey's end, they spread their wings and sank to the muddy waters of the Nile and into the enveloping night.
Then arose a voice like a wind on the desert, but really from the direction of the Nile, where a hired dahabiyeh lay moored to the bank, "'Arry Axes! 'Arry Axes!" With it came also a flapping, trailing vision from the water the sacred Ibis itself and with wings aslant drifted mournfully away to its own creaking echo: "K'raksis! K'raksis!" Again arose the weird voice: "'Arry Axes!
But when they did draw close to a dahabiyeh upon whose deck she saw some white-clad loungers, the Nubian gave a low order to the old woman who rose and gripped Arlee on the wrist and led her to the stateroom, sitting in silence opposite her like a squat gargoyle, till the Nubian's voice permitted them to emerge.
But by and by it turned in its course and came beating back against the wind till opposite it was the city; then it tacked in to that same place near the bank, and there the boy was waving at them. Skillfully the dahabiyeh was brought about close to the high bank; and ropes thrown from bow and stern were quickly staked and made fast.
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