“We’ll see,” he answered.  “It’ll be all right about the work, Ruby.  You see the Pyramids well now.”

She looked across the flats to those great tombs which draw the world to their feet.

“I wish it wasn’t so horribly cold,” she said.

And Baroudi was away in the gold of the south, and perhaps with the “Full Moon.”

“It won’t be half so bad when we get to Mena House.  There’s always a wind on this road in winter.”

“And in the Fayyum?  Will it be cold there?”

“No, not like this.  Only at nights it gets cold sometimes, and there’s often a thick mist.”

“A thick mist!”

“But we shall be warm and cosy in our tent, and we shall know nothing about it.”

And the Loulia was floating up the Nile into the heart of the gold!  Her heart sank.  But then she remembered her resolution in the villa.  And her vanity, and that which a moment ago had seemed to be fighting against it, clasped hands in resistant friendship.

The victoria rolled smoothly; the horses trotted fast in the brisk air; the line of the desert, pale and vague in the windy morning, grew more distinct, more full of summons; the orifice that was the end of the avenue gaped like a mouth that opens more widely.  A line of donkeys appeared, with here and there a white camel with tasselled trappings, surrounded by groups of shouting Egyptians, who stared at the carriage with avaricious eyes.  “Ah—­ah!” shouted the coachman.  The horses broke into a gallop, turned into a garden on the right, and drew up before the Mena House.

A minute later Mrs. Armine was standing on a terrace that ended in a sea of pale yellow sand.  Nigel followed her, but only after some minutes.

“You seem to know everybody here,” she said to him, in a slightly constrained voice, as he came to stand beside her.

“Well, there are several fellows from Cairo come here to spend Sunday.”

“With their wives apparently.”

“Yes, some of them.  Of course last winter I got to know a good many people.  It’s much warmer here.  We get all the sun, and there’s much less wind.  And isn’t the Great Pyramid grand?”

He took her gently by the arm.

“The Sphinx is beyond.  I want you to see that for the first time just before nightfall, Ruby.”

“Whatever you like,” she said.

Her voice still sounded constrained.  On the veranda and in the hall of the hotel she had had to run the gauntlet, and now that she was married again, and had abandoned the defiant life which she had led for so many years, somehow she had become less careless of opinion, of the hostility of women, than she had formerly been.  She wished to be accepted again.  As Lady Harwich she could have forced people to accept her.

As she looked at the Great Pyramid, she was saying that to herself, and Nigel’s words about the Sphinx fell upon inattentive ears.  Although he did not know it, in bringing her to Mena House just at this moment he had taken a step that was unwise.  But he was walking in the dark.