n them. They did not feel
quite simultaneously. Lady Betty was always a step behind Clarice. Yes,
that was the difference between them. However quickly the echo follows
the voice that summons it, yet it must always follow. Would Lady Betty
never cease to follow? Bellairs found himself wondering eagerly, for
that afternoon a strange certainty came to him. He knew, in a flash,
that Clarice, if she did not already love him, was on the verge of
loving him. He knew now that he loved Lady Betty. But she didn't love
him yet, was not even quite close to loving him. Had she been in Egypt
alone, divorced from Clarice, Bellairs believed that he would not have
attracted her. He attracted her through Clarice, because he attracted
Clarice. Could he make her love him in the same way? It would be a
curious, subtle experiment to try to win one woman's heart by winning
another's: Bellairs silently decided to make it. All the rest of that
afternoon he talked to Clarice, showing to her the new self that Egypt
had given him, the poetry which had ousted the prose inherited from a
long line of ancestors, the sentiment of which he was no longer ashamed
now he felt it to be a weapon with which he might win two hearts, the
heart that contained another heart, as one conjurer's box contains a
hundred others.

* * * * *

"I knew it when I first saw you," Clarice said. "Directly I looked at
you that evening on the bank I knew it."

"How strange," Bellairs answered.

"And you--did you know it when you heard me playing?"

"That mazurka! Remember I am a man."

They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out,
for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and
the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could
hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in
the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill
the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed
by gratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had
told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been
returned.

"Will this kiss, too, have its echo?" he thought; and his eyes travelled
towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty
sat. He turned again to Clarice.

"Do you believe in echoes?" he asked.

"Echoes!"

"That each thing we do in life, each word, ea