e but herself and the man for whom she
cared.

She realised that distinctly. She looked forward a little, too, and she
understood that if Durrance did not, after all, keep Ethne to her
promise and marry her and go with her to her country, he would come back
to Guessens. That reflection showed Mrs. Adair yet more clearly the
folly of her outcry. If she had only kept silence, she would have had a
very true and constant friend for her neighbour, and that would have
been something. It would have been a good deal. But, since she had
spoken, they could never meet without embarrassment, and, practise
cordiality as they might, there would always remain in their minds the
recollection of what she had said and he had listened to on the
afternoon when he left for Wiesbaden.

CHAPTER XXIV

ON THE NILE

It was a callous country inhabited by a callous race, thought Calder, as
he travelled down the Nile from Wadi Halfa to Assouan on his three
months' furlough. He leaned over the rail of the upper deck of the
steamer and looked down upon the barge lashed alongside. On the lower
deck of the barge among the native passengers stood an angareb,[2]
whereon was stretched the motionless figure of a human being shrouded in
a black veil. The angareb and its burden had been carried on board early
that morning at Korosko by two Arabs, who now sat laughing and
chattering in the stern of the barge. It might have been a dead man or a
dead woman who lay still and stretched out upon the bedstead, so little
heed did they give to it. Calder lifted his eyes and looked to his right
and his left across glaring sand and barren rocks shaped roughly into
the hard forms of pyramids. The narrow meagre strip of green close by
the water's edge upon each bank was the only response which the Soudan
made to Spring and Summer and the beneficent rain. A callous country
inhabited by a callous people.

[Footnote 2: The native bedstead of matting woven across a four-legged
frame.]

Calder looked downwards again to the angareb upon the barge's deck and
the figure lying upon it. Whether it was man or woman he could not
tell. The black veil lay close about the face, outlining the nose, the
hollows of the eyes and the mouth; but whether the lips wore a moustache
and the chin a beard, it did not reveal.

The slanting sunlight crept nearer and nearer to the angareb. The
natives seated close to it moved into the shadow of the upper deck, but
no one moved the a