CHAPTER XLIX

Jill sat on the edge of her bed in an hotel at Suez.

That she was absolutely alone in Egypt, and ought not to have been alone, never entered her head once, as she gazed through the open window towards the sea.

Her eyes shone like stars, her mouth was a beautiful sign of content, her hands were clasped peacefully on her knee, and she simply radiated happiness.

Mary and Jack, Lady Bingham, Diana Lytham and Sir Timothy and Lady Sarah, had started that morning for England in the great liner which Jill had watched unconcernedly until it disappeared up the canal.

And so for the first time for many weary weeks she was alone, though it must be confessed that the liberty had only been gained by a deliberate perversion of the truth.

Fussed by kind-hearted, though, somewhat scandalised Lady Gruntham, driven to the point of madness by the never-ending stream of wisdom, advice, and plans which from morning till night flowed unceasingly from the store of Mary’s book-gleaned knowledge, Jill had cleared up the situation all round by suddenly announcing the imaginative fact that Hahmed was coming to Cairo to fetch her home.  Whereupon Mary Bingham had arranged everything to her own entire satisfaction in the twinkling of an eye, told Jack Wetherbourne that she and her mother were leaving for England if he’d like to come too, had worked her maid to death with packing, distributing quite a fair supply of backsheesh, and had bundled her bewildered mother and contented fiance down to Suez, where Jill had seen them off to the accompaniment of a last final flood of advice which was mercifully lost in the scream of the siren, the rasp of machinery, and the manifold sounds which add hilariously, especially in foreign climes, to the pandemonium that reigns to within a second of the cry which invites some of us to descend to terra firma on the occasion of the sailing of a passenger boat.

Jill suddenly came out of a reverie which had painted her cheeks a most exquisite pink, and caused her teeth to show in the faintest smile.

Then she frowned and shook back her mane of hair, as was her habit when perplexed, and spoke softly to the night wind which was blowing straight in at the window from the other side of the canal.

“The oasis is calling me, night wind, calling, calling, and yet I do not know.  You who come from the oasis, tell me, is my beloved there, or shall I find my dwelling empty, and my happiness but as a turned-down cup?”

Who can explain what it is that leads the spirit astraying from its material covering?

Are love and longing its sole companions upon the road of shadows?  Surely no! for is not revenge, or jealousy, or the near approach of that which is called death as potent to span the stretches of the world; and will not a vision of stark terror blot out the sun at the commonplace hour of noon, and may not the body, squatting on the market pavement, find it a place of rest, even as unto a seat in paradise through the spirit’s communion?