"Isn't it wonderful, Ruby?"
"Yes," she said. "Quite wonderful."
She honestly thought it superb, but the dust in her hair and in her skirts, the lassitude that seemed to hang, almost like spiders' webs about wood, about the body which contained her tired spirit, restrained her enthusiasm from being a match for his. Perhaps she knew this and wished to come up with him, for she added, throwing a warm sound into her voice: "It is exquisite. It is the most magical thing I have ever seen."
She touched her veil, as she spoke, and put up her hand to her hair behind. Two Frenchmen, talking with sonorous voices, were just then passing them on the road.
"I didn't know any sunset could be so marvellous."
She was still touching her hair, and now she felt clothed in dust; and, with the ardour of a fastidious woman who has not seen the inside of a dressing-room for twenty-four hours, she longed to be rid both of the sunset and of the man.
"Where is the villa, Nigel?"
"Not ten minutes away."
The spirit groaned within her, and she went resolutely forward, passing the Winter Palace Hotel.
"What a huge hotel--but it isn't open!" she said.
"It will be almost directly. We turn to the right down here."
Some large rats were playing on the uneven stones close to the river; from a little shed close by there came the dull puffing of an engine.
"Where on earth are we going, Nigel? This is only a donkey track."
"It's all right. Just wait a minute. There's the Dutchman's castle, and we are just beyond it. Am I walking too fast for you, Ruby?"
"No, no."
She hurried on. Her whole body was clamouring for warm water with a certain essence dissolved in it, for a change of stockings and shoes, for a tea-gown, for a sofa with a tea-table beside it, for a hundred and one things his manhood did not dream of.
"Here it is at last!" he said.
A tall and amiable-looking boy in a flowing gold-coloured robe suddenly appeared before them, holding open a wooden gate, through which they passed into a garden.
"Hulloh, Ibrahim!" cried Nigel.
"Hulloh, my gentleman!" returned the boy, inclining his body towards Mrs. Armine and touching his fez with his hand. "I am Ibrahim Ahmed, my lady, the special servant called a dragoman of my Lord Arminigel. I can read the hieroglyphs, and I am always young and cheerful."
He took Nigel's right hand, kissed it and placed it against his forehead rapidly three times in succession, smiled, and looked sideways on the ground.