And the maid ran on, happy in a subject that appealed to her whole nature.

Mrs. Armine dined alone and quickly.  It was past nine o’clock when she finished, and went out to sit on the terrace and to smoke her cigarette and drink her coffee.  In returning from the mountains she had scarcely spoken to Ibrahim, and had not spoken to Hamza except to wish him good-night upon the bank of the Nile.  She remembered now the expression in his almond-shaped eyes when he had returned her salutation—­an unfathomable expression of ruthless understanding that stripped her nature bare of all disguises, and seemed to leave it as it was for all the men of this land to see.

Ibrahim’s eyes never could look like Hamza’s.  And yet between Ibrahim and Hamza what essential difference was there!

Suddenly she said to herself:  “Why should I bother my head about these people, a servant and a donkey-boy?”

In England she would never have cared in the least what the people in her service thought about her.  But out here things seemed to be different.  And Ibrahim and Hamza had brought her to the place where Baroudi had been waiting to meet her.  They were in Baroudi’s pay.  That was the crude fact.  She considered it now as she sat alone, sipping the Turkish coffee that Hassan had carried out to her, and smoking her cigarette.  She said to herself that she ought to be angry, but she knew that she was not angry.  She knew that she was pleased that Ibrahim and Hamza had been bought by Baroudi.  Easterns are born with an appetite for intrigue, with a love of walking in hidden ways and creeping along devious paths.  Why should those by whom she happened to be surrounded discard their natures?

And then she thought of Nigel.

How much more at her ease she was with Baroudi than she could ever be with Nigel!  What Nigel desired she could never give him.  She might seem to give it, but the bread would be really a stone, even if he were deceived.  And he would be deceived.  But what Baroudi desired she could give.  It seemed to her to-night indeed that she was born to give just what he desired.  She made no mistake about herself.  And he could give to her exactly what she wanted.  So she thought now.  For, since the long day in the mountains, her old ambition seemed to have died, to have been slain, and, with its death, had suddenly grown more fierce within her the governing love, or governing greed, for material things-for money, jewels, lovely bibelots, for all that is summed up in the one word luxe.  And Baroudi was immensely rich, and would grow continually richer.  She knew how to weigh a man in the balance, and though, even for her, there was mystery in him, she could form a perfectly right judgment of his practical capacity, of his power of acquirement.

But he could give her more than luxe, much, more than luxe.

And as she acknowledged that to herself, there came into Mrs. Armine’s heart a new inhabitant.