"Puisque votre mari n'y est plus, parlons Français," he said.
"Comme vous voulez," she replied.
She did not ask him why he preferred to speak in French. Very few whys stood just then between her and this man whom she scarcely knew. They went on talking in French. At first Baroudi continued to stand in the sun, and she looked up at him with composure from her place of shadow.
"Armant is in this direction?" she said.
"I do not say that, but it is not so far as the Fayyûm."
"I know so little of Egypt. You must forgive my ignorance."
"You will know more of my country, much more than other Englishwomen—some day."
He spoke with an almost brutal composure and self-possession, and she noticed that he no longer closed his sentences with the word "madame." His great eyes, as they looked steadily down to her, were as direct, as cruelly direct, in their gaze as the eyes of a bird of prey. They pierced her defences, but to-day did not permit her, in return, to pierce his, to penetrate, even a little way, into his territory of thought, of feeling. She remembered the eyes of Meyer Isaacson. They, too, were almost cruelly penetrating; but whereas they distinctly showed his mind at work, the eyes of Baroudi now seemed to hide what his mind was doing while they stared at the working of hers. And this combination of refusal and robbery, blatantly selfish and egoistic, conveyed to her spirit an extraordinary sense of his power. For years she had dominated men. This man could dominate her. He knew it. He had always known it, from the first moment when his eyes rested on hers. Was it that which was Greek or that which was Egyptian in him which already overcame her? the keenly practical and energetic or the mysterious and fatalistic? As yet she could not tell. Perhaps he had a double lure for the two sides of her nature.
"Do you think so?" she said. "I doubt it. I'm not sure that I shall spend another winter in Egypt."
His eyes became more sombre, looked suddenly as if even their material weight must have increased.