“What are you doing, Hassan?” asked Mrs. Armine.

The tall Nubian turned towards her.

“Mahmoud Baroudi is rich!” he said.  “Mahmoud Baroudi is rich!”

He looked again at the dahabeeyah; then he came to the little table, moved a plate, touched and smoothed the table-cloth, and went quietly away.

Mrs. Armine sipped her tea and looked, still frowning, at the river, which began to lose its brown colour slowly, to gleam at first with pallid gold, then with a gold that shone like fire.  The eddies beyond the breakwater were a light and delicate mauve and looked nervously alive.  A strange radiance that was both ethereal and voluptuous, that seemed to combine elements both spiritual and material, was falling over this world, clothing it in a sparkling veil of beauty.  And as the gold on the river deepened in hue, it spread swiftly upon the water, it travelled down towards Luxor, it crept from the western bank to the eastern bank of the Nile, from the dahabeeyah of Baroudi almost to the feet of Mrs. Armine.

“Mahmoud Baroudi is rich!  Mahmoud Baroudi is rich!”

Why had Hassan said that?  What had it to do with her?  She looked across at Baroudi’s great white boat, which now was turning into a black jewel on the gold of the moving river, and she felt as if, like some magician who understood her nature, he was trying to comfort her to-day by showering gold towards her.  It was an absurd fancy, at which, in a moment, she was smiling bitterly enough.

She almost hated Nigel to-day.  When she had left him in the garden before luncheon, she had quite hated him for his unworldliness, combined with a sort of boyish simplicity and wistfulness.  Of course he had known, he must have known, that Zoe Harwich was going to have a child; he must have known it when he was shooting with his brother in the autumn.  And he had never said a word of it to her.  And now he was cut out of the succession.  He might never have succeeded his brother; but there had been a great chance that he would, that some day she would be reigning as Lady Harwich.  That thought had swayed her towards him, had had very much to do with the part she had played in London which had won her Nigel as a husband.  If what was now a fact had been a fact a few weeks ago, would she ever have schemed to marry him, would such an alliance have been “worth her while”?

How Lady Hayman and all her tribe, a tribe which once had petted and entertained the beautiful Mrs. Chepstow, had dubbed her “Bella Donna,” how they must be rejoicing to-day!  She could almost hear what they were saying as she sat in the sunset by the Nile.  “What a mercy that woman has overreached herself!” “How furious she must, be, now Harwich has got sons!” “What a delicious slap in the face for her after catching that foolish Nigel Armine!” Hundreds of women were smiling over her discomfiture at this moment, and probably also hundreds of men.  For no one