The Loulia gone from the reach of the river which was visible from the garden of the Villa Androud; Nigel gone from the house which was surrounded by that garden; a complete solitude, a complete emptiness of golden days stretching out before Mrs. Armine! When she woke to that little bit of truth, fitted in to the puzzle of the truths of her life, she looked into vacancy, and asked of herself some questions.
Presently she came down to the drawing-room, dressed in a thin coat and skirt that were suitable for riding, for walking, for sitting among ruins, for gardening, for any active occupation. Yet she had no plan in her head; only she was absolutely free to-day, and if it occurred to her to want to do anything, why, she was completely ready for the doing of it. Meanwhile she sat down on the terrace and she looked about the garden.
No one was to be seen in it from where she was sitting. The Egyptian gardener was at work, or at rest in some hidden place, and all the garden was at peace.
It was a golden day, almost incredibly clear and radiant, quivering with brightness and life, and surely with ecstasy. She was set free, in a passionate wonder of gold. That was the first fact of which she was sharply conscious. By this time Nigel must be in Cairo; by the evening he would be in that fabled Fayyum of which she had heard so much, which had become to her almost as a moral symbol. In the Fayyum fluted the Egyptian Pan by the water; in the Fayyum, as in an ample and fruitful bosom, dwelt untrammelled Nature, loosed from all shackles of civilization. And there, perhaps to-morrow, Nigel would begin making his eager preparations for her reception and housing--his ardent preparations for the taking of her "right down to Nature," as he had once phrased it to her. She touched her whitened cheek with her carefully manicured fingers, and she wondered, not without irony, at the strange chances of human life. What imp had taken her by the hand to lead her to a tent in the Fayyum, in which she would dwell with a man full of an almost sacred moral enthusiasm? She would surely be more at home lying on embroideries and heaped-up cushions, with her nostrils full of a faint but heavy perfume of the East, and her ears of the murmur of dancing waters, and her mind, or spirit, or soul, or whatever it was, in contact with another "whatever it was," unlit, unheated, by fires that might possibly scorch her, but that could never purify her.