Baroudi made a polite rejoinder, in his curiously careless and calmly detached way, but he did not press them again to stay any longer, and Nigel felt certain that he had many things to do—­preparations, perhaps, to make for his departure that evening.  He was decidedly not a “woman’s man,” but was a keen and pertinacious man of affairs, who liked the activities of life and knew how to deal with men.

He bade them good-bye on the deck of the sailors.

Just before she stepped down into the waiting felucca, Mrs. Armine, as if moved by an impulse she could not resist, turned her head and gazed at the strange Arabic Letters of gold that were carved above the doorway through which she had once more passed.

“The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.”

Baroudi followed her eyes, and a smile, that had no brightness in it, flickered over his full lips, then died, leaving behind it an impassible serenity.

That night, just when the moon was coming, the Loulia, gleaming with many lights, passed the garden of the Villa Androud, and soon was lost in the night, going towards the south.

On the following evening, by the express that went to Cairo, Nigel started for the Fayyum.

XVI

The Loulia gone from the reach of the river which was visible from the garden of the Villa Androud; Nigel gone from the house which was surrounded by that garden; a complete solitude, a complete emptiness of golden days stretching out before Mrs. Armine!  When she woke to that little bit of truth, fitted in to the puzzle of the truths of her life, she looked into vacancy, and asked of herself some questions.

Presently she came down to the drawing-room, dressed in a thin coat and skirt that were suitable for riding, for walking, for sitting among ruins, for gardening, for any active occupation.  Yet she had no plan in her head; only she was absolutely free to-day, and if it occurred to her to want to do anything, why, she was completely ready for the doing of it.  Meanwhile she sat down on the terrace and she looked about the garden.

No one was to be seen in it from where she was sitting.  The Egyptian gardener was at work, or at rest in some hidden place, and all the garden was at peace.

It was a golden day, almost incredibly clear and radiant, quivering with brightness and life, and surely with ecstasy.  She was set free, in a passionate wonder of gold.  That was the first fact of which she was sharply conscious.  By this time Nigel must be in Cairo; by the evening he would be in that fabled Fayyum of which she had heard so much, which had become to her almost as a moral symbol.  In the Fayyum fluted the Egyptian Pan by the water; in the Fayyum, as in an ample and fruitful bosom, dwelt untrammelled Nature, loosed from all shackles of civilization.  And there, perhaps to-morrow, Nigel would begin making