"Is the villa far away?" she said, looking round on the crowd of staring Egyptians.
"No, I want you to walk to it. Do you mind?"
His eyes demanded a "no," and she gave it him with a good grace that ought to have been written down to her credit by the pen of the recording angel. They set out to walk to the villa. As they went through the little town, Nigel pointed out the various "objects of interest": the antiquity shops, where may be purchased rings, necklaces, and amulets, blue and green "servants of the dead," scarabs, winged discs, and mummy-cases; the mosque, a Coptic church, cafés, the garden of the Hôtel de Luxor. He greeted several friends of humble origin: the black barber who called himself "Mr. White"; Ahri Achmed, the Folly of Luxor, who danced and gibbered at Mrs. Armine and cried out a welcome in many languages; Hassan, the one-eyed pipe-player; and Hamza, the praying donkey-boy, who in winter stole all the millionaires from his protesting comrades and in summer sat with the dervishes in the deep shadows of the mosques.
"You seem to be as much at home here as in London," said Mrs. Armine, in a voice that was rather vague.
"Ten times more, Ruby. And so will you be soon. I love a little place."
"Yes?"
After a pause she added: "Are there many villas here?"
"Only two on the bank of the Nile. One belongs to a Dutchman. Our villa is the other."
"Only two--and one belongs to a Dutchman!" she thought.
And she wondered about their winter.
"When I've settled you in, I must run off to the Fayyûm to see how the work is going, and rig up something for you. I want to take you there soon, but it's really in the wilds, and I didn't like to straight away. Besides I was afraid you might be dull and unhappy without any of your comforts. And I do want you to be happy."
There was an anxiety that was almost wistful in his voice.
"I do want you to like Egypt," he added, like an eager boy.
"I am sure I shall like it, Nigel. There's no Casino, I suppose!"
"Good heavens, no! What should one do with a Casino here!"
"Oh, they sometimes have one, even in places like this. A friend of mine who went to Biskra told me there was one there."
"Look at that, Ruby! That's better than any Casino--don't you think?"
They had turned to the left and come to the river bank.
All the Nile was flooded with gold, in which there were eddies of pale mauve and distant flushes of a red that resembled the red on the wing of a flamingo. The clear and radiant sky was drowned in a quivering radiance of gold, that was like a thing alive and sensitively palpitating. The far-off palms, the lofty river banks that framed the Nile's upper reaches, the birds that flew south, following the direction of the breeze, the bats that wheeled about the great columns of the temple, the boats that with wide-spread lateen sails went southward with the birds, were like motionless and moving jewels of black against the vibrant gold. And the crenellated mountains of Libya, beyond Thebes and the tombs of the Kings, stood like spectral sentinels at their posts till the pageant should be over.