His Hour | Page 5

had not asked her a single question or expressed the least curiosity. For
some reason she felt piqued.
Presently they emerged at the end of the village where there was a
small lake left by the retirement of the Nile. The moon, almost full, was
mirrored in it. The scene was one of extreme beauty. The pyramids
appeared an old rose pink, and everything else in tones of sapphire--not
the green-blue of moonlight in other countries. All was breathlessly
still and lifeless. Only they two, and the camel boys, alone in the night.
The dark line of trees which border the road faced them, and 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