“It will be almost directly.  We turn to the right down here.”

Some large rats were playing on the uneven stones close to the river; from a little shed close by there came the dull puffing of an engine.

“Where on earth are we going, Nigel?  This is only a donkey track.”

“It’s all right.  Just wait a minute.  There’s the Dutchman’s castle, and we are just beyond it.  Am I walking too fast for you, Ruby?”

“No, no.”

She hurried on.  Her whole body was clamouring for warm water with a certain essence dissolved in it, for a change of stockings and shoes, for a tea-gown, for a sofa with a tea-table beside it, for a hundred and one things his manhood did not dream of.

“Here it is at last!” he said.

A tall and amiable-looking boy in a flowing gold-coloured robe suddenly appeared before them, holding open a wooden gate, through which they passed into a garden.

“Hulloh, Ibrahim!” cried Nigel.

“Hulloh, my gentleman!” returned the boy, inclining his body towards Mrs. Armine and touching his fez with his hand.  “I am Ibrahim Ahmed, my lady, the special servant called a dragoman of my Lord Arminigel.  I can read the hieroglyphs, and I am always young and cheerful.”

He took Nigel’s right hand, kissed it and placed it against his forehead rapidly three times in succession, smiled, and looked sideways on the ground.

“I am always young and cheerful,” he repeated, softly and dreamily.  He picked a red rose from a bush, placed it between his white teeth, and turned to conduct them to the white house that stood in the midst of the garden perhaps a hundred yards away.

“What a nice boy!” said Mrs. Armine.

“He’s been my dragoman before.  This is our little domain.”

Mrs. Armine saw a flat expanse of brown and sun-dried earth, completely devoid of grass, and divided roughly into sunken beds containing small orange-trees, mimosas, rose-bushes, poinsettias, and geraniums.  It was bounded on three sides by earthen walls and on the fourth side by the Nile.

“Is it not beautiful, mees?” said Ibrahim.

Mrs. Armine began to laugh.

“He takes me for a vieille fille!” she said.  “Is it a compliment, Nigel?  Ibrahim,”—­she touched the boy’s robe—­“won’t you give me that rose?”

“My lady, I will give you all what you want.”

Already she had fascinated him.  As she took the rose, which he offered with a salaam, she began to look quite gay.

“All what you want you must have,” continued Ibrahim, gravely.

“Ibrahim reads my thoughts like a true Eastern!” said Nigel.

“What I want now is a bath,” remarked Mrs. Armine, smelling the rose.

“Directly we have had one more look at the Nile from our own garden,” exclaimed Nigel.

But she had stopped before the house.

“I can’t take my bath in the Nile.  Good-bye, Nigel!”