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?”
[CHAPTER XX—PRIVATE INTERESTS]
When Benifett Bindane found himself writing “February 1st” upon his letters, he suddenly became the victim of a violent fit of energy. Time was passing, and not much progress had been made with his great scheme for the floating of the Egyptian Oases Development Company. By nature he was indolent, and he had thoroughly enjoyed his three months basking in the Egyptian sun. It was always a great pleasure to him to sit in the warmest corner of a veranda, to glance at the Financial News, and then to stare in front of him with an empty countenance and a mind full of wonderful commercial schemes.
He had the habit of thinking in millions; and his brain, in many ways so deficient, was capable of visualizing an extraordinarily prolonged repetition of the figure “o” at the end of any sum in pounds sterling.