"You leave everythin' to Ibrahim. You go in your tent, and presently I come."
She went at once into the tent, and sat down on a folding chair. A little round iron table stood before it. She leaned her arms on the table and laid her face against the back of her hand. Her cheek was burning. She sprang up, went to her dressing-case, unlocked it, drew out the boîte de beauté which Baroudi had given her in the orange-garden, and quickly made her face up, standing before the glass that was pinned to the canvas. Then she put on a short fur coat. The wind would be cold in the sands. She wondered how far they had to go.
And if Nigel should unexpectedly return, as nearly all husbands did on such occasions?
She could not bother about that. She felt too desperate to care; she felt in the grasp of fate. If the fate was to be untoward, so much the worse for her—and for Nigel. She meant to go beyond that ridge of the sand. That was all she knew. Quickly she buttoned the fur coat and put on a hat and gloves.
"Now we goin' to start."
Ibrahim put his muffled head in at the door of the tent.
"Walking?" she asked.
"We goin' to start walkin'."
When she came out, she found that the brushwood fire had been pulled to pieces.
"Down there they not see nothin'," said Ibrahim, pointing towards the darkness before them.