"I wanted you. You know it."
"That's not true."
"It is true."
"It is not true. How could you want me when you had that dancing-girl with you?"
He shrugged his shoulders, almost like one of the Frenchmen whom he had met ever since he was a child.
"You do not understand the men of the East, or you forget that I am an Oriental," he said.
A sudden idea struck her.
"Perhaps you are married, too?" she exclaimed.
"Of course I am married!"
His eyes narrowed, and his face began to look hard and repellent.
"It is not in our habits to discuss these things," he said.
She felt afraid of his anger.
"I didn't mean--"
She dropped her hands from his cloak.
"But haven't I a right?" she began.
She stopped. What was the use of making any claim upon such a man? What was the use of wasting upon him any feeling either of desire or of anger? What was the use? And yet she could not go without some understanding. She could not ride back into the camp by the lake and settle down to virtue, to domesticity with Nigel. Her whole nature cried out for this man imperiously. His strangeness lured her. His splendid physique appealed to her with a power she could not resist. He dominated her by his indifference as well as by his passion. He fascinated her by his wealth, and by his almost Jewish faculty of acquiring. His irony whipped her, his contempt of morality answered to her contempt. His complete knowledge of what she was warmed, soothed, reposed her.
But the thought of his infidelity to her as soon as she was away from him roused in her a sort of madness.
"How am I to see you again?" she said.
And all that she felt for him went naked in her voice.
"How am I to see you again?"
He stood and looked at her.
"And what is to happen to me if he has found out that I have been away from the camp?"
"Hamza will make an explanation."
"And if he doesn't believe the explanation?"
"You will make one. You will never tell him the truth."
It was a cold command laid like a yoke upon her.
"He can never know I have been here. To-night, directly you are gone, I strike my tents and go back to Cairo. I do not choose to have any bad affairs with the English so long as the English rule in Egypt. I am well looked upon by the English, and so it must continue. Otherwise my affairs might suffer. And that I will not have. Do you understand?"