As he came in, she thought to herself that she had never seen Nigel look so expressive, that she had never imagined he could look so expressive.  Something in his face startled and gripped her.

He, too, gazed at her almost as if with new eyes, as he came towards her, looking resolute, like a man who had taken some big decision since she had last seen him an hour ago.  All day he had seemed curiously watchful, uneasy, sometimes weak, sometimes lively with effort.  Now, though intense, excited, he looked determined, and this determination, too, was like a new note of health.

His eyes went over her bare shoulders.  Then he said: 

“For me!”

His voice lingered over the words.  But his eyes changed in expression as they looked at her face.

“I couldn’t help it to-night Nigel,” she said, coolly.  “I knew I must be looking too frightful after all this journeying.  You must forgive me to-night.”

“Of course I do.  It’s good of you to take this trouble for me, even though I—­Come!  Dinner is ready.”

He drew her arm through his, and led her in to the dining-room.

“Where’s Ibrahim to-night?” she said carelessly, as they sat down.

“He asked if he might go to the village to see his mother, and I let him go.”

“Oh!”

She felt relieved.  Ibrahim had gone to fetch the felucca to take her across the Nile.  A hot excitement surged through her.  In a couple of hours, perhaps in less time, she would see Baroudi, be alone with Baroudi.  How long she had waited!  What torment she had endured!  What danger, what failure she had undergone!  But for a moment she forget everything in that thought which went like wine to her head, “To-night I shall be with Baroudi!” She did not just then go beyond that thought.  She did not ask herself what sort of reception he would give her.  That wine from the mind brought a carelessness, almost a recklessness, with it, preventing analysis, sweeping away fears.  A sort of spasm—­was it the very last?—­of youth seemed to leap up in her, like a brilliant flame from a heap of ashes.  And she let the flame shoot out towards Nigel.

And again he was saying: 

“For me!”

He was repeating it to himself, and he was reiterating silently those terrible words with which he had struck the man who had saved him from death.

“You liar!  You damnable liar!”

The dinner was not the supplice Mrs. Armine had anticipated.  She talked, she laughed, she was gay, frivolous, gentle, careless, as in the days long past when she had charmed men by mental as much as by merely physical qualities.  And Nigel responded with an almost boyish eagerness.  Her liveliness, her merriment, seemed not only to delight but to reassure something within him.  She noticed that.  And, noticing it, she was conscious that with his decision, beneath it as it were, there was something else, some far different quality, stranger to her, though faintly perceived, or perhaps, rather, obscurely divined by that sleepless intuition which lives in certain women.  Her apparent joyousness gave helping hands to something in Nigel, leading it forward, onward—­whither?