Aiyoub stayed by her while she drank, and when she had finished he offered her the embroidered napkin.  She touched it with her lips.

“Do you like it?”

“It is very strange.  But everything here is strange.”

Aiyoub brought once more to his master the basin with the cover and the jug, and Baroudi washed his hands and rinsed his mouth as at the beginning of the meal.  After this ceremony he again muttered a word or words, rose to his feet, took Mrs. Armine’s left hand with his right, and led her to the divan.  Aiyoub brought coffee, lifted the golden tray from its stool, set the coffee on a smaller tray upon the stool close to the divan, and went out, carrying the golden tray very carefully.  As he vanished, the music outside ceased with an abruptness, a lack of finality, that were startling to an European.  The almost thrilling silence that succeeded was broken by a bird singing somewhere among the orange-trees.  It was answered by another bird.

“They are singing the praises of God,” said Baroudi, in a deep and slow voice, and as if he were speaking to himself.

“Those birds!”

She gazed at him in wonder.  He looked at her with sombre eyes.

“You do not know these things.”

Suddenly she felt like an ignorant and stupid child, like one unworthy of knowledge.

He sipped his coffee.  He was now sitting in European fashion beside her on the divan, and his posture made it more difficult for her to accept his strange mentality; for he looked like a tremendously robust, yet very lithe and extremely handsome and determined young man, who might belong to a race of Southern Europe.  Even with the tarbush upon his head his appearance was not unmistakably Eastern.

And this man, evidently quite seriously, talked to her about the birds singing to each other the praises of God.

“You ought to be differently dressed,” she said.

“How?”

“In Egyptian clothes, not English flannels.”

“Some day you shall see me like that,” he said, reassuringly.  “I often wear the kuftan at night upon the Loulia.”

“At night upon the Loulia!  Then how on earth can I see you in it?”

She spoke with a sudden sharp irritation.  To-day her marriage with Nigel seemed to her like a sword suspended above her, which would presently descend upon her, striking her to earth with all her capacity for happiness unused.

“You will see me with the drawers of linen, the sudeyree, the kuftan, the gibbeh—­or, as says my father, jubbeh—­and the turban on my head.  Only you must wait a little.  But women do not like to wait for a pleasure.  They are always in a hurry.”

The cool egoism with which he accepted and commented on her admiration roused in her, not anger, but a sort of almost wondering respect.  It seemed part of his strength.  He lifted his eyebrows, threw back his head, showing his magnificent throat, and with the gesture that she had noticed in the garden of the Villa Androud thrust two fingers inside his low, soft collar, and kept them there while he added: