For two or three minutes Mrs. Armine heard nothing but the noise of the wind, which seemed to have taken entire possession of the chamber, and she felt as if she were its prey and the prey of the darkness. Something that was like hysteria seized upon her, a desperate terror of fate and the unknown. In the wind and in the darkness she had a grievous sensation of helplessness and of doom, of being lost for ever to happiness and light. And when the wind was shut out, when a match grated, a little glow leaped up, and Ibrahim, looking strangely tall and vast in the black woollen abâyeh which he had put on as a protection against the cold, was partially revealed, she sprang towards him with a feeling of unutterable relief.
"Oh, Ibrahim, what an awful night! I'm afraid of it!" she said.
Deftly he lit the lamp; then he turned to her and stared.
"My lady, you are all white, like the lotus what Rameses him carry."
She had laid her hand on his arm. Now she let it drop, sat down on the sofa, unpinned her hat and veil, and threw them down on the floor.
"It's the storm. I hate the sound of wind at night."
"The ginnee him ride in the wind," said Ibrahim, very seriously.
"The ginnee! What is that?"
"Bad spirit. Him come to do harm. Him bin in the room to-night."
They looked at each other in silence. Then Mrs. Armine said: "Is the shutter quite safe now?"
"Suttinly."
"Then good night, Ibrahim."
"Good night, my lady."
He went over to the door.
"Suttinly the ginnee him bin in the room to-night," he said, solemnly.
She tried to smile at this absurdity, but her lips refused to obey her will.
"Who should he come for?" she asked.
"I dunno. P'raps he come to meet my Lord Arminigel. It is bad night to-night. Mohammed him die to-night. Him die on the night from Sunday Monday."
He drooped morosely and went out, softly closing the door behind him.
As soon as he had gone Mrs. Armine undressed, leaving her clothes scattered pell-mell all over the room, and got into her bed. She kept the lamp burning. She was afraid of the dark, and she knew she would not sleep. Although she laughed at Egyptian superstition, as she glanced about the room she was half unconsciously looking for the shadowy form of a ginnee. All night the wind roared, and all night she lay awake, wondering, fearing, planning, imagining, in terror of the future, yet calling upon her adroitness, her strong fund of resolution, to shape it as she willed.