He took her hand in his and raised her to her feet.
“Yes, Daniel, we had better be going,” she replied.
She linked her arm in his; and thus they walked slowly back to the tents, he looking down at her, and she looking up at him, and around them the vast spaces of the desert already dim with the coming of night.
[CHAPTER XVII—DESTINY]
Upon the following morning, before eleven o’clock, Muriel installed herself in a hammock slung from the lower branches of a shady sycamore, some yards distant from the rose-bushes and shrubs which screened her favourite alcove, now appropriated by Daniel. She had brought with her from the house a handful of fashion-papers and illustrated journals, but these she did not read as, with one foot touching the ground, she swung herself gently to and fro. She looked up through the tracery of the foliage to the brilliant blue of the sky, and her mind was too occupied with her thoughts to give its attention to the latest manner in which the women of Paris, London, and New York were adorning their nakedness.
Little shafts of sunlight, like fiery rods, pierced through the cool blue shadow wherein she lay; and beyond the protection of the heavy foliage the lawn of newly-sown grass gleamed in the radiance of the morning. The faithful northwest wind, which almost daily blows over the desert from the Mediterranean, was gently rustling the greenery overhead, and rattling the hard leaves of the palms; and she could hear the cry of the circling kites above her, though she could only see these scavengers of the air when they swooped and tumbled down, as though in play, to snatch at any edible fragments floating upon the surface of the Nile.
All around her she was aware of the joy of existence, flashing out like laughter and vibrating like song. The water sprinkled upon the lawn by the garden hose seemed to be making merry in the sunshine; a black and grey cow lurching across the grass seemed to be overcome with hilarity; the palm-leaves swaying in the breeze might have been shaking with mirth; and the babbling of the river as it swirled past the terrace was like an endless lyric of well-being.
Muriel was too happily content to indulge in any profound self-analysis; but vaguely she was conscious that her life had entered upon a new phase, and shamelessly she asked herself whether the guiding hand were love. She had realized for some time that Rupert Helsingham had made a spurious impression upon her heart, and during the recent weeks of amusement she had come to wonder how it was that he had aroused any emotion in her, except that caused by his tragic death.
Now, however, she was aglow with buoyant happiness, and she had a persistent feeling that all was well with her. Yesterday, on her return from Daniel’s camp, she had spoken to Kate Bindane of this sense of well-being, and her friend’s reply had set her laughing.
“My dear,” Kate had said, “I’m sure I don’t want to mess up your bright picture of things; but in my opinion, look at it as you will, the joy of life is always some sort of an itch and the scratching of it.”