"Yes."
"Why?"
"Hamza is a very good donkey-boy."
In that moment Mrs. Armine began to feel afraid of Hamza, even afraid of his prayers. That was strangely absurd, she knew, because she believed in nothing. Baroudi now let himself sink down a little, and rested his cheek upon his hand. Somewhere he had learnt the secret of European postures. There had been depths of strangeness in his singing. There was a depth of strangeness in his demeanour. He had greeted her from the Nile by night when he was far away in Alexandria; he had ordered Ibrahim and Hamza to bring her into this solitary place, and now he lay beside her with his strong body at rest, and his mind, apparently, lost in some vagrant reverie, not heeding her, not making any effort to please her, not even--so it seemed to her now--thinking about her. Why was she not piqued, indignant? Why was she even actually charmed by his indifference?
She did not ask herself why. Perhaps she was catching from him a mood that had never before been hers.
For a long time they remained thus side by side, quite motionless, quite silent. And that period of stillness was to Mrs. Armine the most strange period she had ever passed through in a life that had been full of events. In that stillness she was being subdued, in that stillness moulded, in that stillness drawn away. What was active, and how was it active? What spoke in the stillness? No echoes replied with their charmed voices among the gleaming rocks of the Libyan mountains. Nevertheless, something had lifted up a voice and had cried aloud. And an answer had come that had been no echo.
In repose there is renewal. When they spoke again the almost avid desire to make the most of the years that remained to her had grown much stronger in Mrs. Armine, and there had been born within her one of those curious beliefs which, it seems, come only to women--the belief that there was reserved for her a revenge upon a fate, the fate that had taken from her the possibility of having all that she had married Nigel to obtain, and the belief that she would achieve that revenge by means of the man who lay beside her.