in the environs of Cairo when the building craze was at its height during the “boom” of 1906.  But he did not tell her of a governing factor in his life—­his secret hatred of the English, originally implanted in him by his father, and nourished by certain incidents that had occurred in his own experience.  He did not tell her, in more ample detail, what he had already hinted at on the evening when Nigel had brought him to the villa, how certain Egyptians love to gratify not merely their vanity and their sensuality, but also their secret loathing of their masters, by betraying those masters in the most cruel way when the opportunity is offered to them.  He did not tell her that since he had been almost a boy—­quite a boy according to English ideas—­he, like a good many of his smart, semi-cultured, self-possessed, and physically attractive young contemporaries, had gloried in his triumphs among the Occidental women who come in crowds to spend the winters in Cairo and upon the Nile, had gloried still more in the thought that with every triumph he struck a blow at the Western man who thought him a child, unfit to rule, who ruled him for his own benefit, and who very quietly despised him.

Perhaps he feared lest Mrs. Armine might guess at a bitter truth of his nature, and shrink from him, despite the powerful attraction he possessed for her, despite her own freedom from scruple, her own ironic and even cruel outlook upon the average man.

In any case he was silent, and she almost forgot the shadow of his truth, which had risen out of the depths and stood before her on the terraces of the Villa Androud.  Had she remembered it now, it might have rendered her uneasy, but it could not have recalled her from the path down which she was just beginning to go.  For her life had blunted her, had coarsened her nature.  She had followed too many ignoble impulses, has succumbed too often to whim, to be the happy slave of delicacy, or to allow any sense of patriotism to keep her hand in virtue’s.

She told herself that when Baroudi’s eyes had spoken to her on the Hohenzollern they had spoken in reply to the summons of her beauty, and for no other reason.  What else could such a woman think?  And yet there were moments when feminine intuition sought for another reason, and, not finding it, went hungry.

Baroudi had no need to seek for more reasons in her than jumped to his eyes.  Ever since he had been sixteen he had been accustomed to the effect that his assurance, combined with his remarkable physique, had upon Western women.

And so each day Ibrahim and Hamza brought this Western woman to the place he had appointed, and always he was there before her.

Baroudi loved secrecy, and Mrs. Armine had nothing to fear at present from indiscretion of his.  And she had no fear of that kind in connection with him.