"Zilah is careless. Insist that she puts away your boots, and does not
leave your clothes lying on the floor. There was a scorpion in the
bathroom to-day," he said lazily, stretching out his long legs.
She flushed hotly, as she always did when he made any casual reference
to the intimacy of their life. It was his casualness that frightened
her, the carelessly implied continuance of a state that scorched her
with shame. His attitude invariably suggested a duration of their
relations that left her numb with a kind of helpless despair. He was so
sure of himself, so sure of his possession of her.
She felt the warm blood pouring over her face now, up to the roots of
her bright hair and dyeing her slender neck, and she put her hands up
to her head, her fingers thrust through her loose curls, to shield her
face from his eyes.
She gave a sigh of relief when Gaston came in bringing a little tray
with two filigree-cased cups of coffee.
"I have brought coffee; Madame's tea is finished," he murmured in tones
of deepest distress, and with a gesture that conveyed a national
calamity.
There had been just enough tea taken on the tour to last a month. It
was another pin-prick, another reminder. She set her teeth, moving her
head angrily, and found herself looking into a pair of mocking eyes,
and, as always, her own dropped.
Gaston said a few words in Arabic to his master, and the Sheik
swallowed the boiling coffee and went out hastily. The valet moved
about the tent with his usual deft noiselessness, gathering up
cigarette ends and spent matches, and tidying the room with an
assiduous orderliness that was peculiarly his own. Diana watched him
almost peevishly. Was it the influence of the desert that made all
these men cat-like in their movements, or was the servant consciously
or unconsciously copying his master? With a sudden fit of childish
irritability she longed to smash something, and, with an impetuous
hand, sent the little inlaid table with the tray and coffee-cups
flying. She was ashamed of the impulse even before the crash came, and
looked at Gaston clearing up the debris with anxious eyes. What was the
matter with her? The even temper on which she prided herself and the
nerves that had been her boast had vanished, gone by the board in the
last month. If her nerve failed her utterly what would become of her?
What would she do?
Gaston had gone, and she looked around the tent with a hunted
expression. There seemed no escape possible from the misery that was
almost more than she could bear.