“What d’you mean?” she exclaimed angrily, but he only smiled at her, and salaamed.
It was disgusting, and she felt a cold shiver creep down her spine, as she hastened across to the others.
As she jogged along, day after day, towards Cairo her thoughts were given more and more to the subject of her coming return to her father. What was she going to say to him? It had all seemed so easy before: she had thought that there would be no difficulty in concocting a plausible story. But now the idea of inventing a pack of lies revolted her; and as they drew ever nearer to the Nile there grew steadily in her mind a determination to tell him the truth.
Daniel, it seemed to her, had deliberately left her to extricate herself; and at the thought her heart was filled with renewed anger against him. Yet had she not told him that her plans were all laid to prevent gossip, to prevent her father’s name being injured? He probably supposed that there would be no scandal; and, after all, why should there be? A little talk in the native quarter, perhaps, that would be all. But these lies she would have to tell her father! They hung over her like a menacing storm.
Yet if she told the truth, what then? Daniel’s reputation would suffer as much as hers: she wondered whether he had realized this fact, when he had obliged her to stay with him for the full fortnight.
Yes, she would tell the truth. It would be a ghastly ordeal, that hour when she would have to face her father; but it would be better than lies, and shufflings, and the crooked ways of which she had seen so much amongst the women she had known in her life.
Suddenly the realization came to her that her character was not such as theirs, that it took no delight in intrigue; and upon that disclosure there followed a new understanding of Daniel’s attitude to her when she had told him of her arrangements for their secret fortnight.
“Good heavens!” she exclaimed, almost speaking aloud in the surprise of her sudden shame. “What a sneaking little liar I must have seemed to him!”
At last one day, in the blaze of noon, they descended from the desert and dismounted from their camels at the gates of Mena House Hotel. Now, towards the end of March, the days were growing hot, and Muriel appreciated to the full the cool halls and shaded rooms of the hotel, and at luncheon the ice which tinkled in her glass seemed to be a very gift of the gods.
Amongst her letters, addressed to the care of Mr. Bindane, she found one from her father, written from the White Nile; and her heart leaped with sudden relief when she read in it that he had decided to extend his tour through the Sudan, and would not be back in Cairo for another three weeks. He suggested to her that she should invite the Bindanes to stay at the Residency, so that Kate could be with her, thereby relieving Lady Smith-Evered of the responsibility of upholding the conventions by her otherwise unnecessary presence; or else that she should remain at Mena House with them until his return.