Baroudi must come up the river. He must be coming up, or the Loulia would surely not be tied up against the western shore. But perhaps she was there only for the night. Perhaps she would sail on the morrow.
Mrs. Armine felt that if the next morning the Loulia was gone she would be unable to remain in Luxor. She would have to take the train and go. Where? Anywhere! To Cairo. She could make some excuse; that she must get some clothes, mourning for Harwich. That would do. She would say she was going only for a couple of days. Nigel would let her go. And Meyer Isaacson?
What he wished and what he meant in regard to her Mrs. Armine did not know. And just at this moment she scarcely cared. The return to the villa and the departure of the Loulia seemed to have fanned the fire within her. While she was on the Loulia, in an enclosed place, rather like a beautiful prison, she had succeeded in concentrating herself to a certain extent on matters in hand. She had had frightful hours of ennui and almost of despair, but she had got through them somehow. And she had been in command.
Now Nigel had been taken forcibly out of her hands, and the beautiful prison was no more theirs. And this return to the home which had seen the opening of her life in Egypt strangely excited her. Once again the Loulia lay there where she had lain when Baroudi was on board of her; once again from the bank of the Nile Mrs. Armine heard the song of Allah in the distance, as on that night when she heard it first, and it was a serenade to her. But how much had happened between then and now!
Now in the house behind her there were two men--the man who did not know her and loved her, and the man who did know her and hated her.
But the man who knew her, and who had wanted her just as she was--he was not there.
She felt that she must see him again, quickly, that she must tell him all that had happened since she had set sail on the Loulia. And yet could she, dared she, leave Nigel alone with Meyer Isaacson?
She paced again on the sand, passing and repassing in front of the darkness of the bushes.
When Isaacson had stood before her in the temple of Edfou, she had had a moment of absolute terror--such a moment as can only come once in a life. A period of fear and of struggle, of agony even, had followed. Yet in that period there had been no moment quite so frightful. For she had confronted the known, not the utterly unexpected, and she had been fighting, and still she must fight.