“Oh, of course.  Night of gold.  Why night?”

“The trees make a sort of darkness round the house.”

“The gold I understand.”

“Yes, you understand gold.”

He stared at her and smiled.

“You understand it as well as I do, but perhaps in a different way,” he said.

“I suppose we understand most things in different ways.”

They spoke in French.  They always spoke French together now.  And Mrs. Armine preferred this.  Somehow she did not care so much for this man translated into English.  She wished she could communicate with him in Arabic, but she was too lazy to try to learn.

“Don’t you think so?” she added.

“I think my way of understanding you is better than Mr. Armeen’s way,” he answered, calmly.

He lit a cigarette.

“What is your way of understanding me, I do not know,” he added.

“Do I understand you at all?” she said.  “Do you wish me to understand you?”

Suddenly she seemed to be confronted by the rock, and a sharp irritation invaded her.  It was followed by a feeling colder and very determined.  The long day was before her.  She was in a very perfect isolation with this man.  She was a woman who had for years made it her business to understand men.  By understanding them—­for what is beauty without any handmaid of brains?—­she had gained fortunes, and squandered them.  By understanding them, when a critical moment had come in her life, she had secured for herself a husband.  It was absurd that a man, who was at least half child—­she thought of the cuckoo-clocks, the gilded dancing-ball—­should baffle her.  If only she called upon her powers, she must be able to turn him inside out like one of her long gloves.  She would do it to-day.  And before he had replied to her question she had left it.

“Who cares for such things on the Nile?” she said.

She laughed.

“At least, what Western woman can care?  I do not.  I am too drunk with your sun.”

She sent him a look.

“Is it to be in—­or out?” she asked.  “The house or the orange-gardens?”

“Which you wish.”

But his movement was outwards, and she seconded it with hers.

As they went down the steps the loud voice of a shaduf man came to them from some distant place by the Nile, reminding her of the great river which seemed ever to be flowing through her Egyptian life, reminding her of the narrowness of Upper Egypt, a corridor between the mountains of Libya and of the Arabian desert.  She stood still at the bottom of the steps to listen.  There was a pause.  Then the fierce voice was lifted again, came to them violently through the ordered alleys of lovely little trees.  The first time she had ever seen the man with whom she had been divorced was at the opera in London.  She remembered now that the opera on that night of fate had been “Aida,” with its cries of the East, with its scenes beside