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Updated: May 20, 2025
"He asked if he might go to the village to see his mother, and I let him go." "Oh!" She felt relieved. Ibrahim had gone to fetch the felucca to take her across the Nile. A hot excitement surged through her. In a couple of hours, perhaps in less time, she would see Baroudi, be alone with Baroudi. How long she had waited! What torment she had endured! What danger, what failure she had undergone!
For an instant she felt as if the stalwart Englishmen, the governing race, whom she knew so well, were only children short-sighted and frigid children that these really submissive Egyptians, Baroudi, Ibrahim, and the praying Hamza, were crafty and hot-blooded men with a divinatory power. "Your coffee," said Baroudi, handing to her a cup.
All night the wind roared, and all night she lay awake, wondering, fearing, planning, imagining, in terror of the future, yet calling upon her adroitness, her strong fund of resolution, to shape it as she willed. And she would have helpers Baroudi, Ibrahim, Hamza.
Armine began to feel afraid of Hamza, even afraid of his prayers. That was strangely absurd, she knew, because she believed in nothing. Baroudi now let himself sink down a little, and rested his cheek upon his hand. Somewhere he had learnt the secret of European postures. There had been depths of strangeness in his singing. There was a depth of strangeness in his demeanour.
To-day she wished that the conversation between her husband and Baroudi might be indefinitely prolonged; for a strange sense of well-being, of calmness, indeed of panacea, was beginning to steal at last upon her, after the excitement, the bitter anger that had upset her spirit.
"Why do women so often ask questions to which they know the answers? Here is Ibrahim with our coffee." At this moment, indeed, Ibrahim came slowly from behind the rocky barrier, carrying coffee-cups, sugar, and a steaming brass coffee-pot on a tray. Without speaking a word, he placed the tray gently upon the ground, filled the cups, handed them to Mrs. Armine and Baroudi, and went quietly away.
Upon the Hohenzollern Baroudi must have laid his plans to see her as he was seeing her now. He did not tell her so, but she knew it. Had she not known it upon ship-board? In their exchange of glances how much had been said and answered? Despite her life of knowledge, she said to herself now that she did not know.
Had her action been very unwise? Several times that day, while with Baroudi, she had felt something that was almost like panic invade her at the thought of what she had done. Now, quite alone and safe, she asked herself whether she had been a fool to obey Nigel's injunction and to trust her own beauty. She gazed; she took off her hat and she gazed again, hard, critically, almost cruelly.
She examined them curiously and minutely, then looked up at him and smiled, thinking of Nigel's gentle but ardent protest. Yes, she could be strangely at home with Baroudi. But now to turn inside out that long glove. She sat down and put her feet on the cushion. Baroudi was instantly cross-legged on the rug. Dressed as he was, in European clothes, he ought to have looked awkward, even ridiculous.
"To tell the truth, I was almost asleep." She stood up, put her hands to her hat, to her hair, and with a slight but very intelligent movement sent the skirt of her gown into place. "Let me out," she said. Nigel drew back, and she stepped out upon the balcony, where Baroudi was leaning upon the railing, looking over the sunlit Nile.
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