“For what?” he asked.
“To forget.”
A horrible pain shot through him. “Do you want to forget all that has passed between us?”
She raised her eyes, frankly, and laughed. “My dear boy, how can we go into such intimate matters among this rabble?”
“Oh, my dear,” said Martin, “I am only asking a very simple question. Do you want to forget?”
“Perhaps not quite,” she replied softly, and the pain through his heart ceased and he held up his head and laughed, and then bent it towards her and asked forgiveness.
“If I didn’t forgive you, I suppose you’d be miserable?”
“Abjectly wretched,” he declared.
“That wouldn’t be a fit frame of mind for a six-hour stifling and dusty railway journey. So let us be happy while we can.”
At Assouan they went to the hotel on the little green island in the middle of the Nile. In the hope of her redeeming a half promise of early descent before dinner, he dressed betimes and waited in the long lounge, his eyes on the lift. She appeared at last, fresh, radiant, as though she had stepped out of the dawn. She sat beside him with an adorable suggestion of intimacy.