And her whole nature, accustomed to the liberty that lies outside the pale, chafed against this small obligation.  Suddenly she came to a resolve.  She would get rid of Marie—­send her back to Europe.  How was she to manage without a maid?  She could not imagine, and at this moment she did not care.  She would get rid of Marie and—­Suddenly a smile came to her lips.

“Why do you larf?” asked Ibrahim.

“Because it is so fine, because I’m happy,” she said.

Really she had smiled at the thought of her explanation to Nigel:  “I don’t want a maid here.  I want to learn to be simple, to do things for myself.  And how could I take her to the Fayyum?”

Nigel would be delighted.

And the Fayyum without a maid?  But she turned her mind resolutely away from that thought.  She would live for the day—­this day on the Nile.  She leaned over the gunwale of the boat, and she gazed towards the south across the great flood that was shining in the gold of the sunshine.  And as she gazed the boat went about, and presently drew in towards the shore.  And upon the top of a high brown bank, where naked brown men were bending and singing by a shaduf, she saw the long ears of a waiting donkey, and then a straight white robe, and a silhouette like a silhouette of bronze, and a wand pointing towards the sun.

Hamza was waiting for her, was waiting—­like a Fate.

XIX

Mrs. Armine rode slowly along the river-bank.  Hamza did not turn the head of the donkey towards the Libyan mountains.  The tombs and the temples of Thebes were far away.  She wondered where she was being taken, but she did not ask again.  She enjoyed this new sensation of being governed from a distance, and she remembered her effort of the imagination when she was shut up in the scented darkness of the Loulia.  She had imagined herself a slave, as Eastern wives are slaves.  Now she glanced at Ibrahim and Hamza, and she thought of the eunuchs who often accompany Eastern women of the highest rank when they go out veiled into the world.  And she touched her floating veil and smiled, as she played with her vagrant thoughts.

This Egyptian life was sharp with the spice of novelty.

Before her, at a short distance, she saw a great green dusk of trees spreading from the river-bank inland, sharply defined, with no ragged edges—­a dusk that had been planned by man, not left to Nature’s dealings.  This was not a feathery dusk of palm-trees.  She looked steadily, and knew.

“Mahmoud Baroudi’s orange-gardens!” she said to Ibrahim.

“Suttinly!” he replied.

He looked towards them, and added, after a pause: 

“They are most beautiful, indeed.”

Then he spoke quickly in Arabic to Hamza.  Hamza replied with volubility.  When he talked with his own people he seemed to become another being.  His almost cruel calm of a bronze vanished.  His face lit up with expression.  A various life broke from him, like a stream suddenly released.  But if Mrs. Armine spoke to him, instantly his rigid calm returned.  He answered “Yes,” and his almond-shaped eyes became impenetrable.