Her brother's voice behind her brought her down to earth suddenly.
"You've been a confounded long time."
She turned to the table with a faint smile. "Don't be a bear, Aubrey.
It's all very well for you. You have Stephens to lather your chin and
to wash your hands, but thanks to that idiot Marie, I have to look
after myself."
Sir Aubrey took his heels down leisurely from the second chair, pitched
away his cigar, and, screwing his eyeglass into his eye with more than
usual truculence, looked at her with disapproval. "Are you going to rig
yourself out like that every evening for the benefit of Mustafa Ali and
the camel-drivers?"
"I do not propose to invite the worthy Mustafa to meals, and I am not
in the habit of 'rigging myself out,' as you so charmingly put it, for
any one's benefit. If you think I dress in camp to please you, my dear
Aubrey, you flatter yourself. I do it entirely to please myself. That
explorer woman we met in London that first year I began travelling with
you explained to me the real moral and physical value of changing into
comfortable, pretty clothes after a hard day in breeches and boots. You
change yourself. What's the difference?"
"All the difference," he snapped. "There is no need for you to make
yourself more attractive than you are already."
"Since when has it occurred to you that I am attractive? You must have
a touch of the sun, Aubrey," she replied, with uplifted eyebrows,
drumming impatiently with her fingers on the table.
"Don't quibble. You know perfectly well that you are good-looking--too
good-looking to carry through this preposterous affair."
"Will you please tell me what you are driving at?" she asked quietly.
But the dark blue eyes fixed on her brother's face were growing darker
as she looked at him.
"I've been doing some hard thinking to-day, Diana. This tour you
propose is impossible."
"Isn't it rather late in the day to find that out?" she interrupted
sarcastically; but he ignored the interruption.
"You must see for yourself, now that you are face to face with the
thing, that it is impossible. It's quite unthinkable that you can
wander for the next month all alone in the desert with those damned
niggers. Though my legal guardianship over you terminated last
September I still have some moral obligations towards you. Though it
has been convenient to me to bring you up as a boy and to regard you in
the light of a younger brother instead of a sister, we cannot get away
from the fact that you are a woman, and a very young woman. There are
certain things a young woman cannot do. If you had been the boy I
always wished you were it would have been a different matter, but you
are not a boy, and the whole thing is impossible--utterly impossible."
There was a fretful impatience in his voice.