"It's ready? Then--then shall I put the sugar in?" she said.
"Yes," said Hamza, looking steadily at her.
She stretched out her hand, but not to the sugar bowl. Just as she did so a voice from over their heads called out: "Ruby! Ruby!"
"Come down here!" she called, in answer.
"But I want you to come up and see the sunset and the afterglow with me."
"Come down here first," she called.
"Right!"
The coffee-making was finished. Hamza got up from his haunches, lifted up the brazier, and went softly away, carrying it with a nonchalant ease almost as if it were a cardboard counterfeit weighing nothing.
In a moment Nigel came into the dim room of the fountain.
"Where are you? Oh, there! We mustn't miss our first sunset."
"Coffee!" she said, smiling.
He came out on to the balcony, and she gave him one of the little cups.
"Did you make it yourself?"
"No. But I will to-morrow. Hamza has been showing me how to."
He took the cup.
"It smells delicious, as enticing as perfumes from Paradise. I think you must have made it."
"Drink it, and believe so--you absurd person!" she said, gently.
He sipped, and she did likewise.
"It's perfect, simply perfect. But what has been put into it to give it this peculiar, delicious flavour, Ruby?"
"Ah, that's my secret."
She sipped from her little cup.
"It is extraordinarily good," she said.
She pointed to the small paper packets, which Hamza had not yet carried off.
"The preparation is almost like some sacred rite," she said. "We put in a little something from this packet, and a little something from that. And we smoke the cups with one of those burning sticks of mastic. And then, at the very end, when the coffee is frothing and creaming, we dust it with sugar. This is the result."
"Simply perfect."
He put his cup down empty.
"Look at that light!" he said, pointing over the rail to the yellow water which they were leaving behind them. "Have you finished?"
"Quite."
"Then let's go on deck--coffee-maker."
They were quite alone. He put his arm around her as she stood up.
"Everything you give me seems to me different from other things," he said--"different, and so much better."
"Your imagination is kind to me--too kind. You are foolish about me."
"Am I?"
He looked into her eyes, and his kind and enthusiastic eyes became almost piercing for an instant.
"And you, Ruby?"
"I?"
"Could you ever be foolish about me?"
For a moment his joy seemed to be clouded by a faint and creeping doubt, as if he were mentally comparing her condition of heart with his, and as if the comparison were beginning--only just beginning--dimly to distress him. She knew just how he was feeling, and she leaned against him, making her body feel weak.