“I was just thinking,” he droned, “that I shall probably get Lane as our General Manager after all.”
She turned upon him. “Oh, you cold-blooded brute! It’s always business first with you. I suppose you’re hoping he’ll never want to come back to Cairo.”
“Well,” he mused, “he evidently feels that life in the Oases suits him better.”
“Ugh!” his wife ejaculated. “I suppose you think he’ll be content to be a sort of pasha out there, with his harîm of Bedouin women; raking in a fat salary from your precious Company, and fleecing the natives to fill your pockets. It’s a pretty picture!”
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY—BURNING SANDS
“Well, it isn’t a prettier picture,” he answered, “to think of a fine man like that messing about Cairo, wasting his time at dinner parties and dances on a wretched Foreign Office pittance.”
Kate did not continue the discussion, and it was not long before she went to her friend’s room, where, entering quietly, she found Muriel standing in her nightdress at the western window, her bare arms resting on the high sill, and her gaze fixed upon the obscurity of the desert which lay black and desolate under the stars. The window was open, and the drifting night-wind stirred the mass of her dark hair which fell about her shoulders.
She turned quickly as she heard the footstep, and Kate was dismayed at the pallor of her face.
“I can’t make him out,” Muriel said. “I can’t make him out. Right out there somewhere, in that blackness, he is smoking his pipe and stroking his dogs and yawning himself to sleep. And yet he must know that I’m here, calling to him and crying to him.”