the work, and arrange something for you.  I’ll get a first-rate tent from Cairo.  I want you in camp with me.  And it’s farther away there, wilder, less civilized; one gets right down to Nature.  When I was in London, before I asked you to marry me, I thought of you at Sennoures.  My camp used to be pitched near water, and at night, when the men slept covered up in their rugs and bits of sacking, and the camels lay in a line, with their faces towards the men’s tent, eating, I used to come out, alone and listen to the frogs singing.  It’s like the note of a flute, and they keep it up all night, the beggars.  You shall come out beside that water, and you shall hear it with me.  It’s odd how a little thing like that stirs up one’s imagination.  Why, even just thinking of that flute of the Egyptian Pan in the night—­” He broke off with a sound that was not quite a laugh, but that held laughter and something else.  “We’ve got, please God, a grand winter ahead of us, Ruby,” he finished.  “And far away from the world.”

“Far—­far away from the world!”

She repeated his words rather slowly.

“I must have some more coffee,” she added, with a change of tone.

“Take care.  You mayn’t be able to sleep.”

“Nigel—­do you want me to sleep to-night?”

He looked at her, but he did not answer.

“Even if I don’t sleep I must have it.  Besides I always sit up late.”

“But to-night you’re tired.”

“Never mind.  I must have the coffee.”

She poured it out and drank it.

“I believe you live very much in the present,” he said.

“Well—­you live very much in the future.”

“Do I?  What makes you think so?”

“My instinct informs me of the fact, and of other facts about you.”

“You’ll make me feel as if I were made of glass if you don’t take care.”

“Live a little more in the present.  Live in the present to-night.”

There was a sound of insistence in her voice, a look of insistence in her bright blue eyes which shone out from their painted shadows, a feeling of insistence in the thin and warm white hand which now she laid upon his.  “Don’t worry about the future.”

He smiled.

“I wasn’t worrying.  I was looking forward.”

“Why?  We are here to-night, Nigel, to live as if we had only to-night to live.  You talk of Sennoures.  But who knows whether we shall ever see Sennoures, ever hear the Egyptian Pan by the water?  I don’t.  You don’t.  But we do know we are here to-night by the Nile.”

With all her force, but secretly, she was trying to destroy in him the spiritual aspiration which was essential in his nature, through which she had won him as her husband, but which now could only irritate and confuse her, and stand in the way of her desires, keeping the path against them.

“Yes,” he said, drawing in his breath.  “We are here to-night by the Nile, and we hear the boatmen singing.”