Slowly she closed her eyes, in the Eastern house of Baroudi.

Here Baroudi lay, as she was lying, and smoked the keef, and ate the hashish, and dreamed.

He would never be the slave of a woman.  She felt sure of that.  But he might make a woman his slave.  At moments, when he looked at her, he had the eyes of a slave-owner.  But he might adore a slave with a cruel adoration.  She felt cruelty in him, and it attracted her, it lured her, it responded to something in her nature which understood and respected cruelty, and which secretly despised gentleness.  In his love he would be cruel.  Never would he be quite at the feet of the woman.  His eyes had told her that, had told it to her with insolence.

The gilded ball in the faskeeyeh, the slave covered with jewels in the harim.

She stretched out her arms along the cushions; she stretched out her limbs along the divan, her long limbs that were still graceful and supple.

How old did Baroudi think her?

Arabs never know their ages.  A man, a soldier whom she had known, had told her that once, had told her that Arabs of sixty declare themselves to be twenty-five, not from vanity, but merely because they never reckon the years.  Baroudi would probably never think of her as Englishmen thought of her, would never “bother about” her age.  She had seen no criticism of that kind in his eyes when they stared at her.  Probably he believed her to be quite young, if he thought of her age at all.  More probably he did not think about the matter.

She was in the Eastern house of Baroudi.

When she and Nigel had left London for Egypt she had imagined herself one day, if not governing London—­the “London” that had once almost worshipped her beauty—­at least spurning it as Lady Harwich.  She had wrapped herself in that desire, that dream.  All her thoughts had been connected with London, with people there.  Some day Lord Harwich would die or get himself killed.  Zoe Harwich would sink reluctantly into “Zoe, Lady Harwich,” and she, once the notorious Mrs. Chepstow, would be mistress of Harwich House, Park Lane; of Illington Park, near Ascot; of Goldney Chase in Derbyshire; of Thirlton Castle in Scotland; and of innumerable shooting-lodges, to say nothing of houses at Brighton and Newmarket.  Society might not receive her, but society would have to envy her.  And perhaps—­in the end—­for are not all things possible in the social world of to-day?—­perhaps in the end she would impose herself, she would be accepted again because of her great position.  She had felt that her cleverness and her force of will made even that possible.  Harwich’s letter had swept the dream away, and now, the first shock of her new knowledge passed, though not the anger, the almost burning sense of wrong that had followed immediately upon it, she was characteristically readjusting her point of view upon her future.  She had schemed for a certain thing; she had taken