w if the Bedouins pay any tent-taxes, but I suppose that if
they didn't aspire to owning date-palms, they could live in the arid
desert without paying anybody anything. It's the old, old, unchanging
subject--water."

Millicent lapsed into silence. Her chin was resting on her hands; she
was lying face downwards on the sand. Michael was resting beside her.
Hassan and the few servants they had taken with them to attend to their
picnic-lunch were fast asleep. The camels and mules made a picturesque
note in the distance. On Millicent's camel a pale blue sheepskin rug
covered the fine saddle; it looked like a patch of the heavens dropped
down to earth.

"I know what is the most English thing I can think of," she said, "the
most English thing compared to all this Easternness--how I adore it,
Mike!"

"The English thing you've thought of, or the Easternness?"

"Oh, the Easternness. England's placid and fat and bountiful, but all
this throbbing emptiness----!"

"Tell me your English scene," he said. Something in Millicent's eyes
drove him into speech. He, too, knew the throbbing silence, the
solitude that thunders, the emptiness that is full of passion.

"Well, first look at that tent and at those lazy, straight,
brown-limbed women--they are just a bit of nature. Summer and winter,
autumn and spring, will never change the scene. Look at that ocean of
sand, and the moving heat, passing like a wave over the desert. Take
off your blue glasses, Mike, and dare to look at the sun. Face your
great God Aton--look Him in the face."

Michael was silent, but he took off his blue glasses. He was no eagle;
his eyes shrank from the world of blinding, unlimited light.

"Now visualize a wee robin 'flirting,' as Wells says, across a green
English lawn."

The suggestion called up a thousand memories. A cloud of home-sickness
dimmed the brightness of the sun. Michael could see a green, green
lawn and the figure of his mother busy at her flower-beds; the robin's
flirting was growing bolder; it was peeping up into her very face! The
smell of moisture came to his nostrils.

"Nothing is more English than an English robin, Mike! In the autumn,
when it comes near the house, what a darling it is--so well-turned-out,
so fearless of humans!"

"Nothing," Mike said, "unless it's my mother herself, in her gardening
gloves, cutting off the dead heads from the rose-beds."

"But she's Irish!"

"Well, I meant British. When you sa