“He ought to say, ‘May all your days on the Nile be happy,’ Ruby,” said Nigel.

“He only wants the day on which we pay him to be happy.  On any other day we might die like dogs, and he wouldn’t care.”

She stood still in the first court, and looked up at the face of Hathor, which seemed to regard the distant spaces with an eternal sorrow.

“I think you count too much on happiness, Nigel,” she added.  She felt almost impelled by the face to say it.  “I believe it’s a mistake to count upon things,” she added.

“You think it’s a mistake to look forward, as I am doing, to our Nile journey?”

“Perhaps.”

She walked on slowly into the lofty dimness of the temple.

“One never knows what is going to happen,” she added.  And there was almost a grimness in her voice.

“And it all passes away so fast, whatever it is,” he said.  “But that is no reason why we should not take our happiness and enjoy it to the utmost.  Why do you try to damp my enthusiasm to-day?”

“I don’t try.  But it is dangerous to be too sure of happiness beforehand.”

She was speaking superstitiously, and she was really speaking to herself.  At first she had been thinking of, speaking to, him as if for his own good, moved by a sort of dim pity that surely belonged rather to the girl she had been than to the woman she actually was.  Now the darkness of this lonely temple and the knowledge that it was Aphrodite’s—­she thought always of Hathor as Aphrodite—­preyed again upon her spirit as when she first came to it.  She felt the dreadful brevity of a woman’s, of any woman’s triumph over the world of men.  She felt the ghastly shortness of the life of physical beauty.  She seemed to hear the sound of the movement of Time rushing away, to see the darkness of the End closing about her, as now the dimness of this desolate shrine of beauty and love grew deeper round her.

Far up, near the forbidding gloom of the mighty roof, there rose a fiercely petulant sound, a chorus of angry cries.  Large shadows with beating wings came and went rapidly through the forest of heavy columns.  The monstrous bats of Hathor were disturbed in their brooding reveries.  A heavy smell, like the odour of a long-decaying past, lifted itself, as if with a slow, determined effort, to Mrs. Armine’s nostrils.  And ever the light of day failed slowly as she and Nigel went onward, drawn in despite of themselves by the power of the darkness, and by the mysterious perfumes that swept up from the breast of death.

At last they came into the sanctuary, the “Holy of Holies” of Denderah, where once were treasured images of the gods of Egypt, where only the King or his high priest might venture to come, at the fete of the New Year.  They stood in its darkness, this woman who was longing to return to the unbridled life of her sensual and disordered past, and this man who, quite without vanity, believed that he had been permitted to redeem her from it.