Mrs. Armine looked out, listened to the birds, while the sun went down in the west she could not see.  And now Magrib was over, and the first time of the Moslem’s prayer was come.

She wished she need not go, wished it so keenly, so fiercely, that she was startled by her own desire almost as if it had been a spectre rising suddenly to confront her.  She longed to remain in this lodge in the wilderness, to be overtaken by the night of the African stars in the Villa of the Night of Gold.  Now she heard again the far-away voice of the fellah by the shaduf, warning her surely to go.  Or was it not, perhaps, telling her to stay?  It was strange how that old, dead passion, which had metamorphosed her life, returned to her mind in this land.  In its shackles at first she had struggled.  But at last she had abandoned herself, she had become its prisoner.  She had become its slave.  Then she was young.  She was able to realize how far more terrible must be the fate of such a slave who is young no longer.  Again the fellah cried to her from the Nile, and now it seemed to her that his voice was certainly warning her that she must withdraw herself, while yet there was time, from the hands of El-Islam—­while yet there was time!

She had been so concentrated upon herself and her own fears and desires that, though part of her had been surely thinking of Baroudi, part of her had forgotten his existence near her.  As a factor in her life she had been, perhaps, considering him, but not as a man in the room behind her.  The outside world, with its garden of dreaming trees, its gleaming and dying lights, its voices of birds, and more distant voice from the Nile, had subtly possessed her, though it had not given her peace.  For when passion, even of no high and ideal kind, begins to stir in a nature, it rouses not only the bodily powers, but powers more strange and remote—­powers perhaps seldom used, or for long quite disregarded; faculties connected with beauty that is not of man; with odours, with lights, and with voices that have no yearning for man, but that man takes to his inner sanctuary, as his special possession, in those moments when he is most completely alive.

But now into this outer world came an intruder to break a spell, yet to heighten for the watcher at the window fascination and terror.  As the fellah’s voice died away, and Mrs. Armine moved, with an intention surely of flight from dangerous and inexorable hands, Hamza appeared at a short distance from her among the orange-trees.  He spread a garment upon the earth, folded his hands before him, then placed them upon his thighs, inclined himself, and prayed.  And as he made his first inclination of humble worship in the little room behind her Mrs. Armine heard a low murmuring, almost like the sound of bees in sultry weather.  She turned, and saw Baroudi praying, on a prayer-rug with a niche woven in it, which was duly set towards Mecca.

She, the unbeliever, was encompassed by prayer.  And something within her told her that the moment for flight already lay behind her, that she had let it go by unheeded, that the hands which already had touched her would not relax their grasp until—­what?