"I don't want to," she said.
"Why not?"
Already the cloud was evaporating.
"I don't want to suffer. I want to be happy now in the short time I have left for happiness."
"Why do you say 'the short time'?"
"I'm not young any more. And I've suffered enough in my life."
"But through me! How could you suffer? Don't you trust me completely even yet?"
"It isn't that. But--it's dangerous for a woman to be foolish about any man. It's a folly to care too much."
She spoke with a sincerity there was no mistaking, for she was thinking about Baroudi.
"Only sometimes. Only when one cares for the weak, or the insincere. We--needn't count the cost, and hesitate."
She let him close her lips, which were opening for a reply, and while he kissed her she listened to the voices of the shadûf men ever calling on the banks of the river.
When they were on the upper deck those voices seemed to her louder. That evening it was a sunset of sheer gold. The cloudless sky--so it seemed--would brook no other colour; the hills would receive no gift that was not a gift of gold. A pageant of gold that was almost barbaric was offered to Mrs. Armine. Out of the gold the voices cried from banks that were turning black. Always, in Egypt, the gold turns the barques on the Nile, its banks, the palm-trees that sometimes crown them, the houses of the native villages, black. And so it was that evening, but Nigel only saw and thought of the gold.
"At last we are sailing into the gold," he said. "This makes me think of a picture that I love."
"What picture?"
"A picture by Watts, called 'Progress.' In it there is a wonderful glow. I remember I spoke of it to Meyer Isaacson on the evening when I introduced him to you."
She had been leaning over the rail on the starboard side of the boat. Now she lifted her arms, stood straight up, then sat down in a beehive chair, and leaned back against the basket-work, which creaked as if protesting.
"To Meyer Isaacson!" she said. "What did you say about it?"
He turned, set his back against the rail, and looked at her in her hooded shelter.
"We spoke of progress. The picture's an allegory, of course, an allegory of the spiritual progress of the world, and of each one of us. I remember telling Isaacson how firmly I believed in the triumph of good in the world and the individual."
"And what did he say?"
"Isaacson? I don't know that he quite took my view."