rves and supple limbs gone out of
them for ever, and Stephen draws out her despairing letter of
eternal farewell, with a smile lighting up his handsome, pleasing
face.

"Yes, it was much better to wait," he murmurs, "I don't approve of
rushing things!"

III

CHAPTER I

It was morning on the Blue Nile. The turbulent blue river rolled
joyously between its banks, for it was high Nile, and a swift,
light breeze was blowing--the companion of the Dawn. The vault of
the sky seemed arched at a great height above the earth, springing
clearly, without any object to break the line from the horizon of
gold sand, and full of those white, filmy, light-filled gleaming
clouds that are one of the wonders and glories of Upper Egypt and
the Soudan. It was a morning and a scene to make a man's heart rise
high in his breast, and cry out, as his eyes turned from the
level-sanded desert floor, through sunlit space, to the vaulted
roof, "After all, the world is a good house to live in."

Slowly the strong yellow sunlight poured over the plain, the bank
and the river, gilding every ripple; and, as the light grew,
hundreds of delicate shapes--the forms of the ibis and flamingo
and crane, and other river-fowl--became visible, crowding down the
dark banks, with flapping of white and crimson wings, and
stretching of legs, and opening of beaks, rustling down, shaking
their feathers, to bathe and drink of the Blue River.

Wonderful light, and miraculous, gleaming, cloud-filled sky, and
wonderful birds preening their plumage and calling to each other,
and wonderful breeze-swept water, bluer than the bluest depths of
the Indian Ocean.

It was still so early that, in the whole stretch of rollicking,
tumbling, buoyant waters between bank and bank, only one piece of
river-craft could be seen. This pushed onward, cleaving through the
little billows in the teeth of the morning breeze. It was a tiny
naphtha launch--a horrid, fussy, smoking little thing, cutting
through breeze and water, and diffusing a scent of oil and greased
iron in the pure and radiant air. A white bird on the bank looked
at it, and rose with a startled note of alarm, and a flight of
lovely-salmon-coloured colleagues followed. The others merely
looked up and paused, with their wings wide stretched, and then
went on calmly with their toilets--they had seen it before.

In the launch, of which the whole centre was taken by the
naphtha-stove--the engine by courtesy--sat a