And she wondered about their winter.

“When I’ve settled you in, I must run off to the Fayyum to see how the work is going, and rig up something for you.  I want to take you there soon, but it’s really in the wilds, and I didn’t like to straight away.  Besides I was afraid you might be dull and unhappy without any of your comforts.  And I do want you to be happy.”

There was an anxiety that was almost wistful in his voice.

“I do want you to like Egypt,” he added, like an eager boy.

“I am sure I shall like it, Nigel.  There’s no Casino, I suppose!”

“Good heavens, no!  What should one do with a Casino here!”

“Oh, they sometimes have one, even in places like this.  A friend of mine who went to Biskra told me there was one there.”

“Look at that, Ruby!  That’s better than any Casino—­don’t you think?”

They had turned to the left and come to the river bank.

All the Nile was flooded with gold, in which there were eddies of pale mauve and distant flushes of a red that resembled the red on the wing of a flamingo.  The clear and radiant sky was drowned in a quivering radiance of gold, that was like a thing alive and sensitively palpitating.  The far-off palms, the lofty river banks that framed the Nile’s upper reaches, the birds that flew south, following the direction of the breeze, the bats that wheeled about the great columns of the temple, the boats that with wide-spread lateen sails went southward with the birds, were like motionless and moving jewels of black against the vibrant gold.  And the crenellated mountains of Libya, beyond Thebes and the tombs of the Kings, stood like spectral sentinels at their posts till the pageant should be over.

“Isn’t it wonderful, Ruby?”

“Yes,” she said.  “Quite wonderful.”

She honestly thought it superb, but the dust in her hair and in her skirts, the lassitude that seemed to hang, almost like spiders’ webs about wood, about the body which contained her tired spirit, restrained her enthusiasm from being a match for his.  Perhaps she knew this and wished to come up with him, for she added, throwing a warm sound into her voice: 

“It is exquisite.  It is the most magical thing I have ever seen.”

She touched her veil, as she spoke, and put up her hand to her hair behind.  Two Frenchmen, talking with sonorous voices, were just then passing them on the road.

“I didn’t know any sunset could be so marvellous.”

She was still touching her hair, and now she felt clothed in dust; and, with the ardour of a fastidious woman who has not seen the inside of a dressing-room for twenty-four hours, she longed to be rid both of the sunset and of the man.

“Where is the villa, Nigel?”

“Not ten minutes away.”

The spirit groaned within her, and she went resolutely forward, passing the Winter Palace Hotel.

“What a huge hotel—­but it isn’t open!” she said.