She spoke quietly, but he felt excitement behind her apparent calm. In her voice there was an inflexible sound, that seemed to tell him very clearly it meant what it was saying.
Always across the Nile came the song of the Nubian sailors.
"I'm not surprised that you feel like that," he said.
He stood for a moment considering, then he sat down once more, and began to speak with a resolution that seemed to be prompted by passion.
"Ruby, to-day I think I was false to myself, because to-day I was false to my real, my deep-down belief in you. In London I did think you cared for me as a man, not perhaps specially because I'd attracted you by my personality, but because I felt how others misunderstood you. It seemed to me—it seems to me now—that I could answer to a desire in you to which no one else ever tried, ever wished to answer. The others seemed to think you only wanted the things that don't really count—lots of money, luxury, jewels, clothes—you know what I mean. I felt that your real desire was—well, I must put it plainly—to be loved and not lusted after, to be asked for something, not only to be given things. I felt that, I seemed to know it. Wasn't I right?"
"To-night—I don't know," she said.
Her ears were full of the music that wailed and throbbed in the breast of the night.
"Can't you forgive that one going back on myself after all these days and—and nights together? Haven't I proved anything to you in them?"
"You have seemed to, perhaps. But men so often seem, and aren't. And I did think you knew why I had married you."
"Tell me why you married me."