Tired after the dance, Lady Muriel stayed upstairs next day until the luncheon hour. The long windows of her room led out on to a balcony which, being on the west side of the house, remained in the shade for most of the morning; and here in a comfortable basket chair, she lay back idly glancing at the week-old magazines and illustrated papers which the mail had just brought from England. While the sun was not yet high in the heavens the shadow cast by the house was broad enough to mitigate to the eyes the glare of the Egyptian day; and every now and then she laid down her literature to gaze at the brilliant scene before her.

The grounds of the Residency, with the rare flowering trees and imported varieties of palm, the masses of variegated flowers and the fresh-sown lawns of vivid grass, looked like well-kept Botanical Gardens, and appealed more to her cultivated tastes than to the original emotions of her nature. It was all very elegant and civilized and pleasing, and seemed correspondent to the charming new garment—all silk and lace and ribbons—which she was wearing, and to the fashionable literature which she was reading. She, the balcony, the garden, and the deep blue sky might have been a picture on the cover of a society journal.

But when she raised her eyes, and looked over the Nile, which flowed past the white terrace at the bottom of the lawn, and allowed her gaze to rest upon the long line of the distant desert on the opposite bank, the aspect of things, outward and inward, was altered; and momentarily she felt the play of disused or wholly novel sensations lightly touching upon her heart.

So far she was delighted with her experience of Egypt. She enjoyed the heat; she was charmed by the somewhat luxurious life at the Residency; and the deference paid to her as the Great Man’s daughter amused and pleased her. At the dance the previous night she had met half a dozen very possible young officers; and the secretaries whom she saw every day were pleasant enough, little Rupert Helsingham being quite amusing. That afternoon she was going to ride with him, which would be jolly....

There was, however, one small and almost insignificant source of unease in her mind, one little blot upon the enjoyment of the last two or three days. A ruffianly fellow had treated her in a manner bordering on rudeness, and in his presence she had felt stupid. He had shown at first complete indifference to her, and later he had spoken with a sort of easy familiarity which suggested a long experience in dealing with her sex, but no ability to discriminate between the bondwoman and the free. And she had behaved as a bondwoman.

The recollection caused her now to tap her foot angrily upon the tiled floor, and to draw the delicate line of her eyebrows into a puckered frown. The thought which lay at the root of her discomfort was this: she had pretended that their previous meeting had been at the house of the Duchess of Strathness simply because she had been lashed into a desire to assert her own standing in response to his lack of respect. The Duchess was her most exalted relative: she was a Royal Princess who had married the Duke, and the Duke was cousin to her mother. She knew quite well that she had not met Mr. Lane there: she had uttered the words before her nicer instincts had had time to prevail.

She had said it in self-defence—to make an impression; and his reply, whether he had meant it as a snub or not, had stung her. “I’m so bad at names: what’s she like?” Her Royal Highness Princess Augusta Maria, Duchess of Strathness! Of course it was a snub; and she had deserved it. He couldn’t have made a more shattering reply: he couldn’t have said more plainly to her “Now, no airs with me, please!—to me you are just you.”

The recollection of the incident was unpleasant; it made her feel small. She had behaved no better than the servants and shopkeepers who delight to speak in familiar terms of duchesses and dukes. However!... she did not suppose that she would see the man again: he belonged to the desert, not to Cairo; and with this consolation, she dismissed the matter from her mind.

When at last she descended the stairs at the sound of the gong, she came upon General Smith-Evered, who had called to see Lord Blair upon some matter of business, and was just stumping across the hall on his way out. He was a very martial little man. He greeted her with jocularity tempered by deference; he kissed her hand in what he believed to be a very charming old-world manner; he told her what a radiant vision she made as she walked down the great staircase in her pretty summer dress; he described himself as a bluff old soldier fairly bowled over by her youthful grace; and he slapped his leggings with his cane and gloves and kissed his fingers to England, home and beauty.

Muriel knew the type well—in real life, on the stage, and in the comic papers; nevertheless, she felt pleased with the rotund compliments, and there was a pleasurable sense of well-being in her mind as she entered the drawing-room. Here the sun-blinds shaded the long French windows, and the light in the room was so subdued that she did not observe at once that she was not alone. She had paused to rearrange a vase of flowers which stood upon a small table, when a movement behind her caused her to turn; and she found herself face to face with Daniel Lane, who had just risen from the sofa.

“Good morning!” he said, gravely looking at her with his deep-set blue eyes.

Her heart sank: she felt like a schoolgirl in the presence of a master who had lately punished her. “Oh, good morning,” she answered, but she did not offer him her hand.

She turned again to the flowers. “Are you waiting to see my father?” she asked, as she aimlessly withdrew a rose from the bunch and inserted it again at another angle.

“I’ve come to lunch,” he said. “I’m early, I suppose. My watch is busted.”

Deeper sank her heart. “No, you’re not early,” she replied, “the gong’s gone.”

“Good!” he exclaimed; “then you haven’t got a party. I was shy about my clothes.”

He was wearing the same clothes in which she had seen him the night before, except that he appeared to have a clean collar and shirt, his hair was carefully combed back, and he had evidently visited a barber.

“Do sit down,” she said.

“Thanks,” he answered, and remained where he was, his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket, and his eyes fixed upon her.

There was an awkward pause, awkward, that is to say, to Muriel, who could not for the life of her think what to talk about.

“Will you smoke a cigarette?” she asked, handing him the box as a preliminary to an escape from the room.

He took it from her unthinkingly, and, without opening it, put it down upon a table.

“I’ve remembered where it was we met,” he remarked suddenly, as she moved towards the door.

“Really?” There was a note of assumed indifference in her voice; and, as she turned and came back to him, she made a desperate attempt to emulate the cucumber. She felt that there was a challenge in his words, in face of which she could not honourably run away.

“Yes,” he said. “It was at Eastbourne, at your school. I came down to see your head mistress, who was a friend of mine; and they let you come into the drawing-room to tea.”

A wave of recollection passed over her mind. “Of course,” she exclaimed, “that was it.”

They had let her, they had allowed her, to come into the drawing-room to have the honour of making his acquaintance! She paused: the scene of their meeting developed in her mind. A girl had rushed into the schoolroom where she was reading, and had told her that she and one or two others were to go into the drawing-room to make themselves polite to this man, who was described as a great scholar and explorer. She had gone in shyly, and had shaken hands with him, and he had stared at her and, later, had turned his back on her; and, after he had gone, the headmistress had commended her manners as having been quiet, ladylike, and respectful. Respectful!

He was smiling at her when she looked up at him once more. “You were wrong about it being at your cousin’s,” he said.

Muriel felt as though she had been smacked. “Oh, I only suggested that,” she replied, witheringly, “to help you out. I didn’t really suppose that you knew her.”

“I know very few people,” he answered, unmoved. “I can’t afford the time. Life is such a ‘brief candle’ that a man has to choose one of its two pleasures—sociability or study: he can’t enjoy both.”

She looked at him curiously. He must have a tough hide, she thought, to be unruffled by a remark so biting as that she had made. For a moment she stared straight at him, her hand resting on her hip. Then she caught sight of herself in the great mirror against the wall, and her hand slipped hastily from its resting-place: her attitude had been that of a common Spanish dancing-girl. Her eyes fell before his.

“I’ll go and find the others,” she said, and turned from him.

As she did so Lord Blair hurried into the room. He was wearing a hot-weather suit of some sort of drab-coloured silk, straight from the laundry, where, one might have supposed, the trousers had been accidentally shrunk. His stiff and spacious collar, and his expansive tie, folded in the four-in-hand manner and fastened with a large gold pin, detracted from the sense of coolness suggested by his suit; but a rose in his buttonhole gave a comfortable touch of nature to an otherwise artificial figure.

“Ah, good morning, Muriel dear,” he exclaimed, giving her cheek a friendly but quite unaffectionate kiss. “You’ve had a lazy morning, eh? Feel the heat, no doubt. Yes? No? Ah, that’s good, that’s capital! Good morning Mr. Lane, or Daniel, I should say, since you permit it. I hope Muriel has been amusing you.”

“She has,” said Daniel, and Muriel blushed.

Rupert Helsingham entered the room; and, when he had made his salutations, Muriel turned to him with relief, strolling with him across to the windows through which the warm scented air of the garden drifted, bringing with it the drone of the flies and the incessant rustle of the palms.

“Please see that I don’t sit next to that horrible man at lunch,” she whispered.

“There’s no choice,” he answered. “The four of us are alone today.”

“Shall we go in?” said Lord Blair, nodding vigorously to Muriel; and the three men followed her into the dining-room.

The meal proved to be less of an ordeal than she had expected. Their visitor talked at first almost exclusively to his host, who showed him, and discussed, the draft of his reply to the Minister of War; and Muriel made herself quite entrancing to Rupert Helsingham. Under ordinary circumstances she was, in spite of occasional lapses into bored silence, a quick and witty talker; one who speedily established a sympathetic connection with the person with whom she was conversing; and her laughter was frequent and infectious. It was only this Daniel Lane who had such a disturbing effect upon her equanimity; but here, at the opposite side of a large table, she seemed to be out of range of his influence, and she rejoiced in her unimpaired power to captivate the little Diplomatic secretary.

“I am going to call you Rupert at once,” she said to him; and, breaking in on the opposite conversation, “Father,” she demanded, “d’you mind if I call this man by his Christian name? Everybody seems to.”

Lord Blair laughed, holding out his hands in a gesture which indicated that he took no responsibility, and turned to Daniel. “Do you think I ought to let her?” he asked.

To Muriel his remark could hardly have been more unfortunate, and a momentary frown gathered upon her face.

“I think it’s a good idea,” replied Daniel, looking quietly at her. “Then if you quarrel you can revert to ‘Mr. Helsingham’ with telling effect.”

Muriel made a slight movement, not far removed from a toss of her head, and, without giving any reply, continued her conversation to Rupert.

The meal was nearly finished when she became aware that her friend was not paying full attention to her remarks, but was listening to Daniel Lane, whose tongue a glass of wine had loosened, and who was speaking in a low vibrating voice, describing some phases of his life in the desert. At this she, too, began to listen, at first with some irritation, but soon with genuine interest. She had supposed him to be more or less monosyllabic, and she was astonished at his command of languages.

As she fixed her eyes upon him he glanced at her for a moment, and there was a pause in his words. For the first time he was conscious of a look of friendship in her face; and his heart responded to the expression. The pause was hardly noticeable, but to him it was as though something of importance had happened; and when he turned again to continue to address himself to his host, there was a warm impulse behind his words. Muriel thereafter made no further remark to Rupert; but leaning her elbow upon the table, and fingering some grapes, gave her undivided attention to the speaker.

“It’s always a matter of surprise to me,” he was saying, “that people don’t come out more often into the desert. You all sit here in this garden of Egypt, this little strip of fertile land on the banks of the Nile, and you look up at the great wall of the hills to east and west; but you don’t ever seem to think of climbing over and running away into the wonderful country beyond.”

Was it, he asked, that they were afraid of the roads that led nowhere-in-particular, and the tracks that wandered like meandering dreams? Why, those were the best kind of roads, because they merely took your feet wherever your heart suggested—to shady places where you could sprawl on the cool sand; or up to rocks where the sun beat on you and the invigorating wind blew on your face; or down to wells of good water where you could drink your fill and take your rest in the shade of the tamarisks; or along echoing valleys where there was always an interesting turning just ahead; or into the flat plains where the mirage receded before you.

“You soon grow desert-wise,” he said: “you can’t get lost; and at last the tracks will always bring you to some Abraham’s tent, and he’ll lift up his eyes and see you, and come running to you to bid you welcome. And there’s bread for you, and honey, and curds, and camel’s milk, and maybe venison; and tobacco; and quiet, courteous talk far into the night, under the stars; and perhaps a boy’s full-throated song.... I can’t think how you can live your crabbed life here in Cairo, when there’s all that vast liberty so near at hand.”

Muriel sipped her coffee, and listened, with a kind of excitement. His voice had some quality in it which seemed to arouse a response deep in the unfrequented places of her mind. It was as though she saw with her own eyes the scenes which he was describing. With him she ascended the bridlepath over the wall of the hills, and ran laughing down into the valleys beyond, the wind in her face and the sun at her back; with him she went sliding down the golden drifts of sand, or sprang from rock to rock along the course of forgotten torrents; and with him she sat at the camp fire and listened to the far-off cry of the little jackals.

He told of warm moonlight nights spent in the open, when the drowsy eye looks up at the Milky Way, and the mind drifts into sleep, rocked, as it were, in a cradle slung between the planets. He spoke of the first sweet vision of the opalescent dawn, when sleep ends in quiet wakefulness, without a middle period of stupor; and of the rising sun over the low horizon, when every pebble casts a liquid blue shadow and the shallowest footprints in the sand look like little pools of water.

He told of blazing days; of long journeys across hills and plains; of the drumming of the pads of the camels upon the hard tracks; of deep, shadowed gorges, and precipices touched only at the summit by the glare of the sun; of the endless waves of the sand drifts, their sharp ridges seen against the sky, like gold against blue enamel; of flaming sunsets, and mysterious dusks, when, by creeping over the top of a hillock, one might look down at ghostly gazelle drinking from a pool, and might listen to the sucking in of the water.

And more especially he spoke of the freedom of the desert. “Ah, there’s liberty for you!” he exclaimed, and his eyes seemed to be alight with his enthusiasm. “That’s the life for a man! There are no clocks out there, no miserable appointments to keep, no laying of foolish foundation stones, or inspecting of sweating troops, no diplomatic speeches, no wordy documents signifying nothing. Out there the men that you meet speak the truth openly, and do all that they have to do without cunning, and without fuss or frills. If you are wandering and hungry they give you shelter and feed you; if they like you they treat you as a brother; and when they wish to kill you they tell you so, and give you four-and-twenty hours in which to quit. They are free men, and to them all men have the status of the free; all partake, so to speak, of the liberty of the desert.”

He stopped rather abruptly: it was as though suddenly he had become conscious that he had engaged the attention of the company, and was abashed.

“You make me quite restless,” said Lord Blair, as they rose from the table. “Some day you will find me, even conservative me, setting out into that happy playground beyond the horizon. Aha! I grow lyrical, too!”

“I’ve stayed too long,” said Daniel. “I must say good-bye at once. I have a lot of shopping to do, and I told my men to meet me with the camels at five o’clock at Mena House.”

“What!—are you going back at once?” exclaimed Rupert Helsingham, adjusting his eyeglass.

“Yes, I’ve had enough of Cairo,” he laughed. “I feel like a fish out of water here, or rather, I feel like a jackal that has ventured into a village and must make tracks over the wall and away. I’ve stolen a square meal and I’m off again.”

He stood at the door smiling at them. He seemed now to radiate imperturbable and rather disconcerting happiness: it was as though he regarded life as a quiet, good-natured comedy, and the friends before him as participators in the fun. His talking about the desert had, as it were, softened his uncouthness, and had made him of a sudden surprisingly intelligible.

“I’m immensely obliged to you for coming,” said Lord Blair, warmly clasping his hand. “In fact I can’t tell you how highly I value your advice and friendship.”

Muriel held out her hand. She saw this man in a new light, and her hostility was temporarily checked. His words had aroused in her a number of perplexing sensations: it was like tasting a new fruit, in part sweet, in part bitter.

“I’ve enjoyed listening to you,” she said, frankly.

“I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” he replied, his voice sinking, but his eyes fixed powerfully upon her.

There was something dominating in his manner which again caused her to be perverse. “I thought you were talking to my father,” she answered casually.

“No,” he said, “I was speaking to you.”