She softly pressed his hand. Then she lifted it and held it on her knee.
Presently she saw him look up at the stars, and she felt sure that he was connecting her with them, was thinking of her as something almost ideal, or, if not that, as something that might in time become almost ideal.
"Nigel, never be so absurd as to think of me as a star!"
"It must have been the sailors singing. I was looking up at the stars. How wonderful they are!"
As she spoke, she moved very slightly, letting her cloak fall open so that her long throat was exposed.
He looked at her throat, and sighed, seemed to hesitate, and then bent suddenly down as if he were going to kiss it.
Almost fiercely the nasal voice of the singing boatman who gave out the solo part of the song of the Nile came over the garden from the river, and the throbbing of the _daraboukkeh_ sounded loudly in their ears. Nigel lifted his head without kissing her.
"Those boatmen are close to the garden!" he said.
Mrs. Armine wrapped her cloak suddenly round her.
"Would you like to go down to the river and see them?" he added.
"Yes, let us go. I must see them," she said.
She got up from her chair with a quick but graceful movement that was full of fiery impetus, and her eyes were shining almost fiercely, as if they gave a reply to the fierce voices of the boatmen.
Nigel drew her arm through his, and they went down the little sandy path past the motionless orange-trees till they came to the bank of the Nile. Ibrahim was standing there, peeping out whimsically from his fringed and tasselled wrappings, and smoking a cigarette.
"Where are the boatmen, Ibrahim?" said Nigel.
Upon the wide and moving darkness of the river, a great highway of the night leading to far-off African lands, hugging the shore by a tufted darkness of trees, there came a felucca that gleamed with lanterns. The oars sounded in the water, mingling with the voices of the men, whose vague, uncertain forms, some crouched, some standing up, some leaning over the river, that was dyed with streaks of light into which the shining drops fell back from the lifted blades, were half revealed to the watchers above them in the garden.
"I wonder what they are doing here," said Nigel, "and why they come up the river to-night. Whose people can they be?"