Nigel was speaking cheerfully.  She began to attend to his conversation with Baroudi, but she still looked out to the Nile, and did not change her position.  They were really talking about agriculture, and apparently with enthusiasm.  Nigel was giving details of his efforts in the Fayyum.  Now they discussed sand-ploughs.  It seemed an unpromising subject, but they fell upon it with ardour, and found it strangely fruitful.  Even Baroudi seemed to be deeply interested in sand-ploughs.  Mrs. Armine forgot the Nile.  She was not at all interested in sand-ploughs, but she was interested in this other practical side of Baroudi, which was now being displayed to her.  Very soon she knew that of all these details connected with land, its cultivation, the amount of profit it could be made to yield in a given time, the eventual probabilities of profit in a more distant future, he was a master.  And Nigel was talking to him, was listening to him, as a pupil talks and listens to a master.  The greedy side of Mrs. Armine was very practical, as Meyer Isaacson had realized, and therefore she was fitted to appreciate at its full value the practical side of Baroudi.  She felt that here was a man who knew very well how and where to tap the streams whose waters are made of gold, and, as romance seduces many women, so, secretly, this powerful money-making aptitude seduced her temperament, or an important part of it.  She was fascinated by this aptitude, but presently she was still more fascinated by the subtle use that he was making of it.

He was deliberately rousing up Nigel’s ambitions connected with labour, was deliberately stinging him to activity, deliberately prompting him to a sort of manly shame at the thought of his present life of repose.  But he was doing it with an apparent carelessness that was deceptive and very subtle; he was doing it by talking about himself, and his own energy, and his own success, not conceitedly, but simply, and in connection with Nigel’s plans and schemes and desires.

Why was he doing this?  Did he want to send Nigel to spend the winter in the Fayyum?  And did he know that Nigel intended to “rig up something” in the Fayyum for her?

[Illustration]

She began to wonder, to wonder intensely, why Baroudi was stirring up Nigel’s enthusiasm for work.  It seemed as if, for the moment, the two men had entirely forgotten that she was there, had forgotten that in the world there was such a phenomenon as woman.  She had a pleasant sensation of listening securely at a key-hole.  Usually she desired to attract to herself the attention of every man who was near her.  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.  It seemed to her as if in that moment of utter repose in the darkness of the chamber