And gathering her swirling draperies about her, she made to depart, knowing that she had spoken hastily, making vows she could not keep for the very love she denied.  Her hand was upon the silken hangings of her door when she was swung round by the shoulder to face the very essence of cold rage.

“So, woman, you are one of those who have ever hidden an inner chamber of perversity, for surely had I thought to have come to the end of your store of moods and whims.  Listen!  By striking me across the face you have but made my love the greater, but as Allah is above me, I will make you pay, as you say in your far cold country.  You will come to me one day, because such love as ours is not to be denied, and when you come, for that blow I will bruise your lips until the red blood starts from them, and I will bruise your body until marks of black show upon its startling fairness, but above all will I bruise your soul with unsatisfied longings, and unrequited desires, until you lie half dead at my feet; then only will I take you in my arms and carry you to the secret chamber, which Fate has prepared somewhere for the fulfilment of my love.”

And as the love-song died on the night, Jill passed slowly into the inner chamber, failing to see the man kneel to kiss the rug impressed by the passage of her little feet.

PART II

THE FLOWER

CHAPTER XXXII

The Rolls Royce containing representatives of the Savoy and Shepherds in the shapes of beautifully gowned, handsome, placid, somewhat dull, the Honourable Mary Bingham, pronounced Beam, her friend Diana Lytham, and the rotund personalities of Sir Timothy and Lady Sarah Ann Gruntham, drew up behind the menacing hand of a policeman alongside a limousine containing representatives of Shepherds and the Savoy in the shapes of two rotund-to-be daughters and one thin son of the race of Gruntham, and the Honourable Mary’s faded mother, who were all racing home in the search of cool baths, or cooler drinks, or a few moments’ repose in a darkened room in which to forget the stifling half hours of a series of social functions, given in honour of Cairo’s most festive week of the season, before starting on a dressing campaign against the depredations made upon the skin by flies, heat, sand, wind, and cosmetics.

The past middle-aged Sir Timothy of the latest birthday honours, partner in life of Lady Gruntham, and therefore part possessor of the Gruntham family, was whole owner of an army of chimney stacks which, morning, noon, and night, belched thick oily smoke across one of England’s Northern counties in the process of manufacturing a substitute for something; also he owned a banking account almost as big as his honest old heart.

La famille Gruntham were breaking their first wide-eyed, open-mouthed tour de monde in Cairo, having selected their hotel from an advertisement in the A.B.C.