His Hour | Page 5

they rode slowly in that direction.
"You are going to the hotel, I suppose?" he said. "I will see you safely to it."
And they climbed the bank on to the avenue from Cairo.
"And you?" Tamara could not prevent herself from asking. "Where do you go?"
"To hell, sometimes," he answered, and his eyes were full of mist, "but tonight I shall go to bed for a change."
Tamara was nonplussed. She felt intensely commonplace. She was even a little cross with herself. Why had she asked a question?
The Arab horse now took it into his head to curvet and bound in the air for no apparent reason, but the young man did not stir an inch--he laughed.
"Go on, my beauty," he said. "I like you to be so. It shows you are alive."
As they approached the hotel, Tamara began to hope no one would see them. No one who could tell Millicent that she had a companion. She bent down and said rather primly to the young man who was again at her side:
"I am quite safe now, thank you. I need not trouble you any further. Good-bye! and I am so obliged to you for showing me a new way home."
He looked up at her, and his whole face was lit with a whimsical smile.
"Yes, at the gate," he said. "Don't be nervous. I will go at the gate."
Tamara did not speak, and presently they came to the turning into the hotel. Then he stopped.
"I suppose we shall meet again some day," he said. "They have a proverb here, 'Meet before dawn--part not till dawn.' They see into the future in a few drops of water in any hollow thing. Well, good-night"--and before she could answer he was off beyond the hotel up the road and then turning to the right on a sand-path, galloped out of sight into what must be the vast desert.
Where on earth could he be going to?--possibly the devil--if one knew.
CHAPTER II
When Tamara woke in the morning the recollection of her camel ride seemed like a dream. She sat for a long time at the window of her room looking out toward the green world and Cairo. She was trying to adjust things in her mind. This stranger had certainly produced an effect upon her.
She wondered who he was, and how he would look in daylight--and above all whither he had galloped into the desert. Then she wondered at herself. The whole thing was so out of her line--so bizarre--in a life of carefully balanced proprieties. And were the thoughts the Sphinx had awaked in her brain true? Yes, certainly she had been ruled by others always--and had never developed her own soul.
She was very sensitive--that last whimsical smile of the unknown had humiliated her. She felt he had laughed at her prim propriety in wishing to get rid of him before the gate. Indeed, she suddenly felt he might laugh at a good many of the things she did. And this ruffled her serenity. She put up her slender hands and pushed the thick hair back from her forehead with an impatient gesture. It all made her dissatisfied with herself and full of unrest.
"You don't tell me a thing about your Sphinx excursion last night, Tamara," Millicent Hardcastle said at breakfast, rather peevishly. They were sipping coffee together in the latter's room in dressing-gowns. "Was it nice, and had the tourists quite departed?"
"It was wonderful!" and Tamara leant back and looked into distance. "There were no tourists, and it made me think a number of new things--we seem such ordinary people, Millicent."
Mrs. Hardcastle glanced up surprised, not to say offended, with coffee cup poised in the air.
"Yes--you may wonder, but it is true, Milly--we do the same things every day, and think the same thoughts, and are just thoroughly commonplace and uninteresting."
"And you came to these conclusions from gazing at the Sphinx?" Mrs. Hardcastle asked.
"Yes," said Tamara, the pink deepening for a moment in her cheeks. In her whole life she hardly ever had had a secret. "I sat there, Millicent, in the sand opposite the strange image, and it seemed to smile and mock at all little things; it appeared perfectly ridiculous that we pay so much attention to what the world says or thinks. I could not help looking back to the time when you and I were at Dresden together. What dull lives we have both led since! Yours perhaps more filled than mine has been, because you have children; but really we have both been browsing like sheep."
Mrs. Hardcastle now was almost irritated.
"I cannot agree with you," she said. "Our lives have been full of good and pleasant things--and I hope, dear, we have both done our duty."
This, of course, ended the matter! It was so undoubtedly true--each had done her duty.
After