"Do be honest—you know I'm boring you. You have lots of friends here, and I can get partners."
"Things do seem to have taken a wrong turn," he said, "but it was not of my willing." Inwardly he cursed the hour he had ever come. She would never believe that it had been to see her in her evening-dress and to enjoy the rapture of dancing with her.
"We are neither of us much good at pretending," Margaret said. "But never mind—better luck next time! And we had some lovely dances in the early part of the evening."
Her words, without meaning it, implied that before she had been introduced to Mrs. Mervill, they had been happy. They had risen at Margaret's instigation from their table and were wending their way out of the supper-room. Michael was drifting towards the wide balcony, towards the fresh cool air of the river.
"No," Meg said determinedly, "not there." A vision of Mrs. Mervill, pink and fair and seductive, had risen before her, the rose-leaf creature with the hard eyes, who had so abruptly broken her sympathy with Michael.
Michael, without speaking, quickly turned the other way. He let her through the big entrance to the front door of the hotel. The view was ugly and uninteresting, like the surroundings of any huge Western public offices or government buildings. The glory of the hotel was the view from the balcony, overlooking the Nile, and its superb interior decorations.
"The old trade-route to Nubia lies back there," Michael said, indicating the desert, which lay out of sight at the back of the hotel.
"The old route to 'golden-treasured Nubia'?" Margaret said. "Fancy, so close to this fashionable hotel—who would ever dream it!"
"The caravan-route to Nubia—the Kush of the Bible—an immortal road.
To me the word Nubia is full of suggestion."
There was something so distant in the tone of Michael's voice as he spoke, that Margaret found little pleasure in hearing what he had to tell her. How delightful he could have been upon such a subject as the old trade-route to Nubia she knew only too well, so well that she was not going to let herself be hurt by his aloof way of mentioning it.