Would it never end?  Each day seemed to her an eternity, each hour almost a year.  But she knew that she must be patient, though patience was no part of her character.  All through her life she had been an impatient and greedy woman, seizing on what she wanted and holding to it tenaciously.  She had hidden her impatience with her charm, and so she had gained successes.  But now, with so little time left to her for possible enjoyment, gnawed by desire and jealousy, she found her powers reluctant in their coming.  Formerly she had exercised her influence almost without effort.  Now she had to be stubborn in endeavour.  And she knew, with the frightful certainty of the middle-aged woman, that the cruel exertions of her mind must soon tell upon her body.

Her terror, a terror which had never left her during these days and nights on the dahabeeyah, was that her beauty might fade before she was free to go to Baroudi.  She knew now how strongly she had fascinated him, despite his seeming, almost cruel imperturbability.  By her lowest powers, the powers that Nigel ignored and thought that he hated—­though perhaps he too had been partially subject to them—­she had grasped the sensual nature of the Egyptian.  As Starnworth had told Isaacson, Baroudi had within him the madness for women.  He had within him the madness for Bella Donna.  But he knew how to wait for what he wanted.  He was waiting now.  The question that had presented itself to Mrs. Armine again and again during her exile with Nigel was this:  “Will he wait too long?” She knew how fleeting is the Indian summer of women.  And she knew, though she denied it to herself, that if she brought to Baroudi not an Indian summer as her gift, but a fading autumn, she would run the risk of being confronted by the blank cruelty that is so often the offspring of the Eastern conception of women.

Yet in her terror she had always been supported by a fierce energy of hope, until in the holy of holies of Horus she had come face to face with Isaacson.

And now!

Now she sat alone in her cabin, and she stared into the little mirror which Baroudi had given her in the garden of oranges.

And Isaacson watched over her husband.

“The fate of every man have we bound about his neck.”

The Arabic letters of gold seemed to be pressing down upon her, to crush her body and spirit.  She put down the box, and, almost savagely shut down the lid upon it.

And now that she no longer saw herself, she seemed to see Hamza praying, as he had prayed that day in the orange garden when she looked out of the window.  Then she had felt that the hands of the East had grasped her, that they would never let her go, and something within her had recoiled, though something else had desired only that—­to be grasped by Baroudi’s hands.

The praying men had frightened her.  Yet she believed in no God.

If there really was a God!  If He looked upon her now!