She did not ask herself why.  Perhaps she was catching from him a mood that had never before been hers.

For a long time they remained thus side by side, quite motionless, quite silent.  And that period of stillness was to Mrs. Armine the most strange period she had ever passed through in a life that had been full of events.  In that stillness she was being subdued, in that stillness moulded, in that stillness drawn away.  What was active, and how was it active?  What spoke in the stillness?  No echoes replied with their charmed voices among the gleaming rocks of the Libyan mountains.  Nevertheless, something had lifted up a voice and had cried aloud.  And an answer had come that had been no echo.

In repose there is renewal.  When they spoke again the almost avid desire to make the most of the years that remained to her had grown much stronger in Mrs. Armine, and there had been born within her one of those curious beliefs which, it seems, come only to women—­the belief that there was reserved for her a revenge upon a fate, the fate that had taken from her the possibility of having all that she had married Nigel to obtain, and the belief that she would achieve that revenge by means of the man who lay beside her.

XVII

That evening, when Mrs. Armine stepped out of the felucca at the foot of the garden of the Villa Androud, she did not wait for Ibrahim to help her up the bank, but hurried away alone, crossed the garden and the terrace, went to her bedroom, shut and locked the door, lit the candles on either side of the long mirror that stood in the dressing-room, pushed up her veil, and anxiously looked at her “undone” face in the glass.

Had her action been very unwise?  Several times that day, while with Baroudi, she had felt something that was almost like panic invade her at the thought of what she had done.  Now, quite alone and safe, she asked herself whether she had been a fool to obey Nigel’s injunction and to trust her own beauty.

She gazed; she took off her hat and she gazed again, hard, critically, almost cruelly.

There came a sharp knock against the door.

“Who is it?”

“C’est moi, madame!”

Mrs. Armine went to the door and opened it.

“Come here, Marie!” she said, almost roughly, “and tell me the truth.  I don’t want any flattering or any palavering from you.  Do you think I look younger, better looking, with something on my face, or like this?”

She put her face close to the light of the candles and stood quite still.  Marie examined her with sharp attention.

“Madame has got to look much younger here,” she said, at length.  “Madame has changed very much since we have been in Egypt.  I do not know, but I think, perhaps, here madame can go without anything, unless, of course, she is going to be with Frenchmen.  But if madame is much in the sun, at night she should be careful to put—­”