During the ensuing fortnight circumstances were not favourable to the development of their romance. Daniel was closely occupied with the settling of certain political difficulties which had cropped up; and Muriel, on her part, found herself much occupied with the social functions of the Residency which, in the month of January, are always very exacting.

But if there were few opportunities for the tender intimacy of love, there was now the compensation of a very sweet understanding between them. There was no need, so it seemed, for a formal betrothal: the engagement was mutually assumed, and, though no binding words had been spoken, Lord Blair did not have to ask again what were their intentions.

Muriel was, of course, a little disturbed at Daniel’s refusal to allow a definite announcement to be made, or even an irrevocable word to be spoken between them; but actually his attitude was quite understandable. He was keenly aware that his method of life was somewhat peculiar, and he was modest enough to regard himself as a thoroughly undesirable husband.

Muriel had told him all about the Rupert Helsingham affair, and, with some degree of correctness, he had attributed it to the enchantment of the Nile. He had realized, too, that in his own case his most intimate moments with her had occurred under exceptionally romantic circumstances; and though he was too deeply in love thus to explain away her emotions, he could not blind himself to the possibility that their origin was less profound than their intensity suggested.

He was determined not to bind her yet awhile; for, he argued to himself, if the miracle had happened, if really she had found in him her eternal partner, time would prove the fact to them; but if she had been building her love on the deceptive foundations of romantic passion, nothing but ultimate misery would come of the immediate exchange of mutual vows.

Being a philosopher, he did not judge love’s day by the tempest of its passion: indeed, he mistrusted such storms as a frequent cause of disastrous miscalculation. But Muriel, being woman pure and simple—if ever there could be a woman of her upbringing either pure or simple—did not analyse her feelings nor mistrust them. She knew only that Daniel hung like a thunderstorm over the meadows of her heart, and she waited in breathless, headaching silence for his lightnings and his torrents to descend upon her.

There was one aspect of the matter, however, which troubled him. Muriel, he recognized, belonged to a section of English society which was very lax in its morals; and he knew quite well that, in the darkness of the desert on the memorable night of their return from SakkÂra, she had been entirely carried away by her love. The fact did not disturb him in itself, for he was a believer in instinct, and his judgment was not influenced by the conventions. If she really loved him, and if they had mutually taken one another for a life-partnership, no marriage ceremony would make the compact in his eyes more binding, and her desire at once to identify her life irrevocably with that of the chosen one would be comprehended and condoned by him.

But there was the fear at the back of his mind lest she had entered upon the adventure lightly. He knew too much about the ways of Mayfair: perhaps, indeed, his abhorrence of all that that name stood for was exaggerated. Her upbringing, therefore, caused him anxiety: not, be it understood, because of her possible willingness to break the traditional law, but because she might be willing to break it lightly. He hated himself for doubting her; but she was a child of Society, a daughter of the Old Harlot, and no member of her particular branch of that family was above suspicion.

One day, yearning for an hour alone with her, he asked her to come out to his camp on the following evening. She was to dine with the Bindanes at Mena House, and he suggested that he should call for her after dinner, when the young moon would be low in the heavens, and that they should ride out to his tents and talk for a little while.

Muriel fell in with the scheme readily enough; but there was something in her manner and in the expression of her face which indicated that she took the step with deliberation, fully conscious of all that it might involve. And, in actual fact, she did not care what happened. She only wanted to belong to him, to feel that she was in his power and he in hers.

But on the next morning she awoke with a bad cold in her head, and she was obliged to take to her bed. One cannot be really romantic with one’s nose running, and any of love’s most wonderful situations may be ruined by a sneeze.

A few days later, when she was more or less recovered, Daniel told her how disappointed he had been that the arrangement had fallen through.

“I expect it was my guardian angel,” she whispered, with a laugh. “I had made up my mind to come; and I suppose the angel read my thoughts, and said ‘You’d better not,’ and sprinkled a handful of germs over me.”

Daniel was startled. “Why, you don’t think that I...?” He paused. Men are seldom so plain-spoken as women, and seldom face facts so deliberately.

On the following afternoon he was obliged to go to the railway station to pay his farewell respects to a native dignitary on his departure for England upon a commercial mission; and, while walking back through the Levantine shopping quarter, he came upon Lizette who, as he now recollected, lived in this part of the city.

He had not seen her since that night, three and a half months ago, when he had taken her out to supper at Berto’s; and he was distressed to observe the change that had taken place in her. She was looking thin and haggard, and her eyes were like the melancholy eyes of a sick dog.

She glanced at him as she approached and a quick smile of pleasure came into her face; but the etiquette which is always observed in the best circles on such occasions prevented her from showing recognition of a client in a public place. (Money-lenders and dentists follow much the same code.)

Daniel, however, knew nothing about such rules of polite conduct. If Lizette were good enough to talk to in a restaurant she ought to be good enough to salute in the street. He therefore pulled off his hat as she passed, and, pausing, bid her good day.

“I believe you’ve forgotten me,” he declared.

“Forgotten?—no!” she exclaimed. “I not ever forget that pig Barthampton jetÉ par terre.”

“I’m sorry that’s what you remember me by,” he answered, seriously.

“I remember many things,” she said. “But now you are so great, so important: one say you are like the WazÎr of Egypt. I astonish me that you speak here in the street. Lizette belong to the night, and to the American Bar.”

She spoke with bitterness, and Daniel was sorry for her. She looked ill; and the afternoon sun seemed to disintegrate the bloom of the powder upon her face.

“You’re not looking very well,” he commented. “Is there anything the matter?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “The matter is here,” she answered, tapping her heart.

“In love?” he asked.

“No, not love,” she replied, with sudden intensity. “Hate, hate!”

He shook his head. “That’s bad. Whom do you hate?”

“Men,” she said.

There was tragedy in her face; and Daniel, in his simple wisdom, guessed that what she needed was the friendship of a man who had no ulterior motive. He looked along the street, and, seeing that there was a large French cafÉ on the opposite side, asked her whether she would care to go in there and have coffee with him.

She hesitated for a moment; but when he had explained that he had no more than half an hour to spare, and that he could not employ the time better than by talking to her, she crossed the street with him and entered the cafÉ.

“Now tell me what your trouble is,” he said, when they were sipping their coffee at a table in the almost deserted saloon.

“O, it is nothing,” she replied. “I suppose I am ill. I have—how do you say?—the ’ump, eh? If I had the courage I should suicide myself; but the priest he tell me that the little devils in hell are men, and the angels in heaven are men: so you see I cannot escape from men.”

“Oh, men are not so bad,” he told her. “You, of course, see them under rather startling circumstances; and, if I may say so, you can’t always judge of what a man is by looking at a subaltern in the Guards.”

She laughed. “But they tell me they are the Élite of England.”

“Yes, poor lads,” he answered; “but it’s not their fault that they think so: it’s due to other men being so bashful.”

Almost as he spoke a young officer walked past the cafÉ, under the awnings, with an expression on his face which suggested that he detected a very unpleasant smell in the world. He glanced into the saloon, and, seeing Lizette, looked quickly in the other direction.

“That is one of them,” she said. “He come to me every Sunday after Church.”

Daniel turned his eyes to her, and there was pity and horror in them. “Ah, my girl, no wonder you hate us,” he declared. “If I were you, I’d try not to speak to a man for, say, six months.”

“But how to live?” she asked. “I must get the money to live.”

She moved her head from side to side in despair; and Daniel, searching his brains for a solution of the problem, stared out into the sun-bathed street, his brows puckered, his fingers combing back his unruly hair.

“Gee!” he muttered. “You’re in a fix! Hav’n’t you got any relations in Marseilles?”

She nodded, but without animation. “There is my brother Georges-Antoine....”

“Does he know how you earn your living?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “He think I make the hat.”

“How much money have you saved?” he enquired.

She shook her head. “None.”

“Well, look here,” he said. “I’ll pay your fare back to France, if you’ll go.”

She stared at him incredulously. “Why you say that?” she asked.

“Because I hate to see a girl like you behaving like a filthy beast,” he answered sternly. “Oh, why were you such a fool as to start this life?”

“It begin,” she sighed, “it begin so sweet. I was very young; and the man he love me so much. He was the real amant-passionÉ—what you do not know in England. He used to kiss me until my head went round and round; and I was like a mad one when he came into the room. Never in my life again or before was I so drunken by a man....”

Daniel watched her as she told the story of her youthful love, and he saw her eyes grow drowsy and full of memories.

“You must have been very happy,” he said at length.

“Yes, I was happy,” she answered, “but I paid for the happiness with tears and weeping and bitterness.”

“Why?—did he desert you?”

Her voice, which had grown so tender and so near to a whisper, became light and clear in tone once more. “No,” she said, with an almost flippant gesture of the hand, “he died. He had the—how do you say?—the gall-stones.”

Daniel finished his coffee, pensively. The tale, and especially its ending, had a sound of stark and terrible truth about it.

“Then what happened?” he asked.

“Oh, then I was a good girl for half a year, perhaps; but presently when another man made the love to me, I say to myself: ‘If once, then why not twice?’ He was a soldier, big, very strong like you.” She looked at him closely. “Yes, he were very like you; and I thought in my heart, ‘I love him because he is so brave, and I am like a little bird in his hands.’” She laughed. “Oh, I knew he was a man À bonne fortunes. He had many girls; but in love all women are like the Orientals, is it not?—and I was content to have my day, like the new one in the harÎm of the Egyptian pasha here....”

Daniel suddenly clenched the fingers of his hand which rested upon the table. Muriel’s words came into his mind: “You can put me in your harÎm if you want to.” They rang in his ears again, and his heart seemed to stand still in fear.

The murmur of Lizette’s voice continued, and he listened in terror now as she told of her second love.

“Then one night,” she was saying, “we walked together on the road by the sea, the Chemin de la Corniche, you know; and the beautiful stars were in the sky, and there were little lights across the water on the islands of Ratonneau and Pomegne. And I was so tired, and I sat down on the rocks by the sea, and we were all alone....”

Daniel stopped her with a sudden movement of his hand. “I know, I know,” he said. “Don’t tell me!”

“O, I soon forgot my love,” she laughed, thinking that the intensity with which he spoke denoted his concern for her sorrows. “A few months, a few weeks, perhaps, and it was finish. Then some one else, and some one else, and some one else....”

He rose from the table, sick at heart. “I must be going,” he said. “If you will accept my offer, write to me at the Residency, and I’ll send you the money for you to go to your brother.”

She looked at his troubled face with a question in her eyes. “I think you not like me,” she sighed. “I think you have the disgust.”

He shook his head. “No,” he answered, “I think you were not much different from other women at first.”

“And afterwards?”

“I suppose one’s feelings soon get blunted,” he replied; “and you had need of money.”

She assumed an expression, an attitude, not far removed from dignity. “Thank you for being—how you say? fair to me,” she said.

He paid his bill, and walked out of the cafÉ into the blaze of the afternoon sun; but between him and its brilliance the shadow of doubt had descended. “I am not the first of Muriel’s lovers,” he groaned in his heart. “How do I know that I am the last?”

He walked through the city, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, by reason of the clamour in his mind; but as he came down to the river, he raised his eyes and stared out into the west, where the sun was descending towards the far-off hills of the wilderness.

He stood stock still, and his lips moved. “Oh, peace of mind!” he was whispering. “Will you never come down to me here in the valley? Must I go up into the desert to find you once more?”