“What are we going to do to-day, Ibrahim?” said Mrs. Armine, lazily.

Ibrahim came up and stood beside her, looking down in his very gentle and individual way.  He smoothed the front of his djelabieh, lifted his rose, smelt it, and said in his low contralto voice: 

“We are goin’ across the river, my lady.”

“Are we?”

“We are goin’ to take our lunchin’; we are goin’ to be out all day.”

“Oh!  And what about tea?”

“We are goin’ to take it with us in that bottle that looks all made of silver.”

“Silver and—­gold,” she murmured, looking into the radiant distance where Thebes lay cradled in the arms of the sun-god.

“And when are we going, Ibrahim?”

He looked at her, and his soft, pale brown lips stretched themselves and showed his dazzling teeth.

“When you are ready, my lady.”

She looked up into his face.  Ibrahim was twenty, but he was completely a boy, despite his great height and his tried capacities as a dragoman.  Everything in him suggested rather the boy than the young man.  His long and slim and flexible body, his long brown neck, his small head, covered with black hair which curled thickly, the expression in his generally smiling eyes, even his quiet gestures, his dreamy poses, his gait, his way of sitting down and of getting up, all conveyed, or seemed to convey, to those about him the fact that he was a boy.  And there was something very attractive in this very definite youngness of his.  Somehow it inspired confidence.

“I suppose I am ready now.”

Mrs. Armine spoke slowly, always looking up at Ibrahim.

“But is there a felucca to take us over?” she added.

“In four five minutes, my lady.”

“Call to me from here when it is ready.  I leave all the lunch and tea arrangements to you.”

“All what you want you must have, my lady.”

Was that a formula of Ibrahim’s?  To-day he seemed to speak the words with a conviction that was not usual, with some curious under-meaning.  How much of a boy was he really?  As Mrs. Armine went upstairs she was wondering about him.

Nigel had said to her, “You are blossoming here.”  And he had said to her, “You are beautiful, but you do not trust your own beauty.”  And that was true, perhaps.  To-day she would be quite alone with Ibrahim and the Egyptians; she would be in perfect freedom, and downstairs upon the terrace the idea had come to her to fill up the time that must elapse before the felucca arrived in “undoing” her face.  She went into her bedroom, and shut and locked the door.

“The felucca is here suttinly, my lady!”

Ibrahim called from the terrace some ten minutes later; then he came round to the front of the house, and cried out the words again.

“I shall be down in a moment.”

Another ten minutes went by, and then Mrs. Armine appeared.  She had an ivory fly-whisk in her hand, and a white veil was drawn over her face.