"I am always young and cheerful," he repeated, softly and dreamily. He picked a red rose from a bush, placed it between his white teeth, and turned to conduct them to the white house that stood in the midst of the garden perhaps a hundred yards away.
"What a nice boy!" said Mrs. Armine.
"He's been my dragoman before. This is our little domain."
Mrs. Armine saw a flat expanse of brown and sun-dried earth, completely devoid of grass, and divided roughly into sunken beds containing small orange-trees, mimosas, rose-bushes, poinsettias, and geraniums. It was bounded on three sides by earthen walls and on the fourth side by the Nile.
"Is it not beautiful, mees?" said Ibrahim.
Mrs. Armine began to laugh.
"He takes me for a vieille fille!" she said. "Is it a compliment, Nigel? Ibrahim,"--she touched the boy's robe--"won't you give me that rose?"
"My lady, I will give you all what you want."
Already she had fascinated him. As she took the rose, which he offered with a salaam, she began to look quite gay.
"All what you want you must have," continued Ibrahim, gravely.
"Ibrahim reads my thoughts like a true Eastern!" said Nigel.
"What I want now is a bath," remarked Mrs. Armine, smelling the rose.
"Directly we have had one more look at the Nile from our own garden," exclaimed Nigel.
But she had stopped before the house.
"I can't take my bath in the Nile. Good-bye, Nigel!"
Before he could say a word she had crossed a little terrace, disappeared through a French window, and vanished into the villa.
Ibrahim smiled, hung his head, and then murmured in a deep contralto voice: "The wife of my Lord Arminigel, she does not want Ibrahim any more, she does not want the Nile, she wants to be all alone."
He shook his head, which drooped on his long and gentle brown neck, sighed, and repeated dreamily: "She wants to be all alone."
"We'll leave her alone for a little and go and look at the gold."
Meanwhile within the house Mrs. Armine was calling impatiently for her maid.
"For mercy's sake, undress me. I am a mass of dust, and looking perfectly dreadful. Is the bath ready?" she asked, as the girl, who had come running, showed her into a good-sized bedroom.
The maid, who was not the red-eyed maid Nigel had met at the Savoy, shrugged up her small shoulders, and extended her little, greedy hands.
"It is ready, madame; but the water--oh, là, là!"
"What's the matter. What do you mean?"
"The water is the colour of madame's morning chocolate."