“Hamza must be very grateful to you!” she said, slowly.

Baroudi made no reply.  She looked away over the wild geraniums, down the alley between the trees to the hollow in the river-bank, and she saw a lateen sail glide by, and vanish behind the trees, going towards the south.  In a moment another came, then a third, a fourth.  The fourth was orange-coloured.  For an instant she followed its course beyond the leaves of the orange-trees.  How many boats were going southwards!

“All the boats are going southwards to-day,” she said.

“The breeze is from the north,” he answered, prosaically.

“I want to go further up the Nile.”

“If you go, you should take a dahabeeyah.”

“Like the Loulia.  But I am sure there is not a second Loulia on the Nile.”

“Do you think you would like to live for a time upon my Loulia?”

She nodded, without speaking.

More lateen sails went by, like wings.  The effect of them was bizarre, seen thus from a distance and without the bodies to which they were attached.  They became mysterious, and Mrs. Armine was conscious of their mystery.  With Baroudi she felt strangeness, mystery, romance, things she had either as a rule ignored or openly jeered at during many years of her life.  Did she feel them because he did?  The question could not be answered till she knew more of what he felt.

“Perhaps it will be so.  Perhaps you will live upon the Loulia,” he said.

“How could I?  And when?”

“We do in our lives many things we have said to ourselves we never shall do.  And we often do them just at the times when we have thought they will be impossible to do.”

“But you make plans beforehand.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.  Have you made a plan about the Loulia?”

She felt now that he had, and she felt that, like a fly in a web, she was enmeshed in his plan.

Another orange-coloured sail!  Would she ever sail to the south in the Loulia?

“Will you not taste this jelly made of rose-leaves?”

Without touching the ground with his hands, he rose to his feet and stood by the table.

“Yes.  Give me a little, but only a little.”

He drew from one of his pockets a small silver knife, and, with a gentle but strong precision, thrust it into the rose-coloured sweetmeat and carefully detached a piece.  Then he took the piece in his brown fingers and handed it to Mrs. Armine—­who had been watching him with a deep attention, the attention a woman gives only to all the actions, however slight, of a man whose body makes a tremendous appeal to hers.  She took it from him and put it into her mouth.

As she ate it, she shut her eyes.

“And now tell me—­have you made a plan about the Loulia?” she said.

His face, as he looked at her, was a refusal to reply, and so it was not a denial.