Egypt brought back her youth, or, at the least, prolonged and increased steadily the shining and warmth of her Indian summer.  And with that shining and warmth the desire to live fully, to use her present powers in the way that would bring her happiness, grew perpetually in strength and ardour.  She longed for the man who suited her, and for the luxe that he could give her.  With her genuine physical passion for Baroudi there woke the ugly greed that was an essential part of her nature, the greed of the true materialist who cares nothing for a simplicity that has not cost the eyes out of somebody’s head.  She was a woman who loved to know that some one was ruining himself for her.  She took an almost physical pleasure in the spending of money.  And often her mind echoed the words of Hassan, when he looked across the Nile to the tapering mast of the Loulia and murmured, “Mahmoud Baroudi is rich!  Mahmoud Baroudi is rich!” And she yearned to go, not only to Baroudi, but to his gold, and she remembered her fancy when she sat by the Nile, that the gleaming gold on the water was showered towards her by him to comfort her in her solitude.

At last a crisis came.

After staying for a short time at Sennoures, the camp had been moved from the village to the outskirts of the oasis, so that Nigel might be close to his land.  Here the rich fertility, the green abundance of growing things, trailed away into the aridity of the desert, and at night, from the door of the tent, Mrs. Armine could look out upon the pale and vague desolation of the illimitable sands stretching away into the illimitable darkness.  Just at first the vision fascinated her, and she lent an ear to the call of the East, but very soon she was distressed by the sight of the still and unpeopled country, which suggested to her the nameless solitudes into which many women are driven out when the time of their triumph is over.  She did not speak of this to Nigel, but, pretending that the wind at night from the desert chilled her even between the canvas walls of the tent, she had the tent turned round with its orifice towards the oasis.  And she strove to ignore the desert.

Nevertheless, despite what was indeed almost a horror of its spaces, she now found that she felt more strongly their fascination, which seemed calling her, but to danger or sorrow rather than to any pleasure or permanent satisfaction.  She often felt an uneasy desire to be more intimate with the thing which she feared, and which woke up in her a prophetic dread of the future when the Indian summer would have faded for ever.  And when one day Nigel suggested that he should take two or three days’ holiday, and that they should remove the camp into the wilds at the north-eastern end of the sacred lake of Kurun, where Ibrahim and Hamza said he could get some first-rate duck-shooting, and Ruby could come to close quarters with the reality of the Libyan desert, she assented almost eagerly.  Any movement, any change, was welcome to her; and—­she had to be more intimate with the thing which she feared.