“Does any one live out here beyond us?” she added.  “Are those things really tents?”

“Yes, Ruby.”

“It seems incredible that any human beings should deliberately choose to live here.”

“You haven’t ever felt the call of the wild?” he asked.

She looked at him, and said, quickly: 

“Oh, yes.  But it’s different for us.  We come here to get a new experience, to have a thorough change, and we can get away whenever we like.  But just imagine choosing to live here permanently!”

“I’d rather live here than in almost any town.”

He was silent for a moment, and his face lost its joyous expression and became almost eagerly anxious.  Then he said: 

“Ruby, do you hate all this?”

“Hate it!  No, it’s a novelty; it’s strange; it excites me, interests me.”

“You are sure?”

He had suddenly thought of her sitting-room in the Savoy.  Into what a violently different life he had conveyed her!—­into a life that he loved, and that was well fitted for a man to live.  He loved such a life, but perhaps he had been, was being selfish.  He tried to read her face, and was suddenly full of doubts and fears.

“I like roughing it, of course,” he added.  “But, I say, you mustn’t give in to what I like if it doesn’t suit you.  We men are infernally selfish.”

She saw her opportunity.

“Don’t you know yet that women find most of their happiness in pleasing the men they love?” she said.

“But I want to please you.”

“So you shall presently.”

“How?”

“By taking me up the Nile.”

She had sown in his mind the belief that she was living for him unselfishly.  He resolved to pay her with a sterling coin of unselfishness.  Never mind the work!  In this first year he must think always first of her, must dedicate himself to her.  And in making her life to flower was he not reclaiming the desert?

“I will take you up the Nile,” he said.  “Always be frank with me, Ruby.  If—­if things that suit me don’t suit you, tell me so straight out.  I think the one thing that binds two people together with hoops of steel is absolute sincerity.  Even if it hurts, it’s a saviour.”

“Yes, but I am absolutely sincere when I say that I love to live in your life.”

She could afford to say that now, and despite the increasing desolation around them her heart leaped at a prospect of release, for she knew how his mind was working, and she heard the murmur of Nile water round the prow of a dahabeeyah.

That night they camped in an amazing desolation.

The great lake of Kurun, which looks like an inland sea, and which is salt almost as the sea, is embraced at its northern end by another sea of sand.  The vast slopes of the desert of Libya reach down to its waveless waters.  The desolation of the desert is linked with the desolation of this unmurmuring sea, the deep silence of the wastes with the deep silence of the waters.