Why had she let herself be brought, even to spend only three or four days, to such a place as this?  Had she ever had even a momentary desire to see more solitary places than the place from which they had come?  Where was Baroudi at this moment?  What was he feeling, doing, thinking?  She fastened her mind fiercely upon the thought of him, and she saw herself in exile.  Always, until now, she had felt the conviction that Baroudi had some plan in connection with her, and that quiescence on her part was necessary to its ultimate fulfilment.  She had felt that she was in the web of his plan, that she had to wait, that something devised by him would presently happen—­she did not know what—­and that their intercourse would be resumed.

Now, influenced by the desolation towards utter doubt and almost frantic depression, as she came back to her full life, which had surely been for a while in suspense, she asked herself whether she had not been grossly mistaken.  Baroudi had never told her anything about the future, had never given her any hint as to what his meaning was.  Was that because he had had no meaning?  Had she been the victim of her own desires?  Had Baroudi had enough of her and done with her?  Something, that was compounded of something else as well as of vanity, seemed still to be telling her that it was not so.  But to-day, in this terrible greyness, this melancholy, this chilly pallor, she could not trust it.  She turned.

“Ibrahim!  Ibrahim!” she cried out.

He rose from the sands and sauntered towards her.  He came and stood silently beside her.

“Ibrahim,” she began.

She looked at him, and was silent.  Then she called on her resolute self, on the self that had been hardened, coarsened, by the life which she had led.

“Ibrahim, do you know where Baroudi is—­what he has been doing all this time?” she asked.

“What he has bin doin’ I dunno, my lady.  Baroudi he doos very many things.”

“I want to know what he has been doing.  I must, I will know.”

The spell of place, the spell of the great and frigid silence, was suddenly and completely broken.  Mrs. Armine stood up in the sand.  She was losing her self-control.  She looked at the dreary prospect before her, growing sadder as evening drew on; she thought of Nigel perfectly happy, she even saw him down there a black speck in the immensity, creeping onward towards his pleasure, and a fury that was vindictive possessed her.  It seemed to her absolutely monstrous that such a woman as she was should be in such a place, in such a situation, waiting in the sand alone, deserted, with nothing to do, no one to speak to, no prospect of pleasure, no prospect of anything.  A loud voice within her seemed suddenly to cry, to shriek, “I won’t stand this.  I won’t stand it.”

“I’m sick of the Fayyum,” she said fiercely, “utterly sick of it.  I want to go back to the Nile.  Do you know where Baroudi is?  Is he on the Nile?  I hate, I loathe this place.”