“Live for the day as it comes,” he said, “and do not think about to-morrow.”

“That is my philosophy.  But when you are thinking about to-morrow?”

Again she thought of Hamza, and she seemed to see those two, Baroudi and Hamza, starting together on the great pilgrimage.  From it, perhaps made more believing or more fanatical, they had returned—­to step into her life.

“Do you know,” she said, “that either you, or something in Egypt, is—­is—­”

“What?” he asked, with apparent indifference.

“Is having an absurd effect upon me.”

She laughed, with difficulty, frowned, sighed, while he steadily watched her.  At that moment something within her was struggling, like a little, anxious, active creature, striving fiercely, minute though it was, to escape out of a trap.  It seemed to her that it was the introduction of Hamza into her life by Baroudi that was furtively distressing her.

“I always do live for the day as it comes,” she continued.  “In English there’s a saying, ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow—­’”

“To-morrow?”

“‘To-morrow we die.’”

“Are you frightened of death?” he said.

There was an open contempt in his voice.

“You aren’t?”

A light that she had never seen in them before shone in his eyes.  Only from the torches of fatalism does such a light sometimes beacon out, showing an edge of the soul.  It was gone almost before she had time to see it.

“Among men I may talk of such things,” he said, “but not with women.  Do you like the leaves of the roses?”

He held his knife ready above the sweetmeat.

“No; I don’t want any more.  I don’t like it very much.  The taste of it is rather sickly.  Sit down, Baroudi.”

She made a gesture towards the floor.  He obeyed it, and squatted down.  She had meant to “get at” this man.  Well, she had accidentally got at something in him.  He was apparently of the type of those Moslems who are ready to rush upon cold steel in order to attain a sensual Paradise.

Her languor, her dreaming mood in the bright silence of this garden of oranges on the edge of the Nile—­they were leaving her now.  The shaduf man cried again, and again she remembered a night of her youth, again she remembered “Aida,” and the uprising of her nature.  She had been punished for that uprising—­she did not believe by a God, who educates, but by the world, which despises.  Could she be punished again?  It was strange that though for years she had defied the world’s opinion, since she had married again she had again begun, almost without being aware of it, to tend secretly towards desire of conciliating it.  Perhaps that was ungovernable tradition returning to its work within her.  To-day she felt, in her middle life, something of what she had felt then in her youth.  When she had met for the first time at the opera the man for whom afterwards