!

"All the boats are going southwards to-day," she said.

"The breeze is from the north," he answered, prosaically.

"I want to go further up the Nile."

"If you go, you should take a dahabeeyah."

"Like the _Loulia_. But I am sure there is not a second _Loulia_ on the
Nile."

"Do you think you would like to live for a time upon my _Loulia_?"

She nodded, without speaking.

More lateen sails went by, like wings. The effect of them was bizarre,
seen thus from a distance and without the bodies to which they were
attached. They became mysterious, and Mrs. Armine was conscious of their
mystery. With Baroudi she felt strangeness, mystery, romance, things she
had either as a rule ignored or openly jeered at during many years of
her life. Did she feel them because he did? The question could not be
answered till she knew more of what he felt.

"Perhaps it will be so. Perhaps you will live upon the _Loulia_," he
said.

"How could I? And when?"

"We do in our lives many things we have said to ourselves we never shall
do. And we often do them just at the times when we have thought they
will be impossible to do."

"But you make plans beforehand."

"Do I?"

"Yes. Have you made a plan about the _Loulia_?"

She felt now that he had, and she felt that, like a fly in a web, she
was enmeshed in his plan.

Another orange-coloured sail! Would she ever sail to the south in the
_Loulia_?

"Will you not taste this jelly made of rose-leaves?"

Without touching the ground with his hands, he rose to his feet and
stood by the table.

"Yes. Give me a little, but only a little."

He drew from one of his pockets a small silver knife, and, with a gentle
but strong precision, thrust it into the rose-coloured sweetmeat and
carefully detached a piece. Then he took the piece in his brown fingers
and handed it to Mrs. Armine--who had been watching him with a deep
attention, the attention a woman gives only to all the actions, however
slight, of a man whose body makes a tremendous appeal to hers. She took
it from him and put it into her mouth.

As she ate it, she shut her eyes.

"And now tell me--have you made a plan about the _Loulia_?" she said.

His face, as he looked at her, was a refusal to reply, and so it was not
a denial.

"Live for the day as it comes," he said, "and do not think about
to-morrow."

"That is my philosophy. But when you are thinking about to-morrow?"

Again she thought of Hamza, and she seemed to