Our seats in the saloon had been changed.  Now we sat with Alma at the Captain’s table, and though I sorely missed the doctor’s racy talk about Martin Conrad I was charmed by Alma’s bright wit and the fund of her personal anecdotes.  She seemed to know nearly everybody.  My husband knew everybody also, and their conversation never flagged.

Something of the wonderful and worshipful feeling I had had for Alma at the Sacred Heart came back to me, and as for my husband it seemed to me that I was seeing him for the first time.

He persuaded the Captain to give a dance on our last night at sea, so the awnings were spread, the electric lights were turned on, and the deck of the ship became a scene of enchantment.

My husband and Alma led off.  He danced beautifully and she was dressed to perfection.  Not being a dancer myself I stood with the Captain in the darkness outside, looking in on them in the bright and dazzling circle, while the moon-rays were sweeping the waters like a silver fan and the little waves were beating the ship’s side with friendly pats.

I was almost happy.  In my simplicity I was feeling grateful to Alma for having wrought this extraordinary change, so that when, on our arrival at Port Said, my husband said,

“Your friend Madame Lier has made no arrangements for her rooms at Cairo—­hadn’t I better telegraph to our hotel, dear?” I answered, “Yes,” and wondered why he had asked me.

Our hotel was an oriental building, situated on an island at the further side of the Nile.  Formerly the palace of a dead Khedive, who had built it in honour of the visit of an Empress, it had a vast reception hall with a great staircase.

There, with separated rooms, as in London, we remained for three months.  I was enthralled.  Too young and inexperienced to be conscious of the darker side of the picture before me, I found everything beautiful.  I was seeing fashionable life for the first time, and it was entrancing.

Lovely and richly-dressed ladies in silk, velvet, lace, and no limit of jewellery—­the dark French women, the blonde German women, the stately English women, and the American women with their flexuous grace.  And then the British soldiers in their various uniforms, the semi-Turks in their red tarbooshes, and the diplomats of all nationalities, Italian, Austrian, French, German—­what a cosmopolitan world it was, what a meeting-place of all nations!

Every hour had its interest, but I liked best the hour of tea on the terrace, for that was the glorious hour of woman, when every condition invested her dress with added beauty and her smile with greater charm.

Such a blaze of colour in the sunshine!  Such a sea of muslin, flowers, and feathers!  Such lovely female figures in diaphanous clouds of toilettes, delicate as gossamer and varied as the colours in the rainbow!  They were like a living bouquet, as they sat under the shade of the verandah, with the green lawns and the palm trees in front, the red-coated orchestra behind, and the noiseless forms of swarthy Bednouins and Nubians moving to and fro.