lyphs, and I am always young and cheerful."

He took Nigel's right hand, kissed it and placed it against his forehead
rapidly three times in succession, smiled, and looked sideways on the
ground.

"I am always young and cheerful," he repeated, softly and dreamily. He
picked a red rose from a bush, placed it between his white teeth, and
turned to conduct them to the white house that stood in the midst of the
garden perhaps a hundred yards away.

"What a nice boy!" said Mrs. Armine.

"He's been my dragoman before. This is our little domain."

Mrs. Armine saw a flat expanse of brown and sun-dried earth, completely
devoid of grass, and divided roughly into sunken beds containing small
orange-trees, mimosas, rose-bushes, poinsettias, and geraniums. It was
bounded on three sides by earthen walls and on the fourth side by the
Nile.

"Is it not beautiful, mees?" said Ibrahim.

Mrs. Armine began to laugh.

"He takes me for a _vieille fille_!" she said. "Is it a compliment,
Nigel? Ibrahim,"--she touched the boy's robe--"won't you give me that
rose?"

"My lady, I will give you all what you want."

Already she had fascinated him. As she took the rose, which he offered
with a salaam, she began to look quite gay.

"All what you want you must have," continued Ibrahim, gravely.

"Ibrahim reads my thoughts like a true Eastern!" said Nigel.

"What I want now is a bath," remarked Mrs. Armine, smelling the rose.

"Directly we have had one more look at the Nile from our own garden,"
exclaimed Nigel.

But she had stopped before the house.

"I can't take my bath in the Nile. Good-bye, Nigel!"

Before he could say a word she had crossed a little terrace, disappeared
through a French window, and vanished into the villa.

Ibrahim smiled, hung his head, and then murmured in a deep contralto
voice:

"The wife of my Lord Arminigel, she does not want Ibrahim any more, she
does not want the Nile, she wants to be all alone."

He shook his head, which drooped on his long and gentle brown neck,
sighed, and repeated dreamily:

"She wants to be all alone."

"We'll leave her alone for a little and go and look at the gold."

Meanwhile within the house Mrs. Armine was calling impatiently for her
maid.

"For mercy's sake, undress me. I am a mass of dust, and looking
perfectly dreadful. Is the bath ready?" she asked, as the girl, who had
come running, showed her into a good-sized bedroom.

The maid, who was not the red-eyed mai