"I must have some more coffee," she added, with a change of tone.
"Take care. You mayn't be able to sleep."
"Nigel--do you want me to sleep to-night?"
"Even if I don't sleep I must have it. Besides I always sit up late."
"I believe you live very much in the present," he said.
"Well--you live very much in the future."
"My instinct informs me of the fact, and of other facts about you."
"You'll make me feel as if I were made of glass if you don't take care."
"Live a little more in the present. Live in the present to-night."
There was a sound of insistence in her voice, a look of insistence in her bright blue eyes which shone out from their painted shadows, a feeling of insistence in the thin and warm white hand which now she laid upon his. "Don't worry about the future."
"I wasn't worrying. I was looking forward."
"Why? We are here to-night, Nigel, to live as if we had only to-night to live. You talk of Sennoures. But who knows whether we shall ever see Sennoures, ever hear the Egyptian Pan by the water? I don't. You don't. But we do know we are here to-night by the Nile."
With all her force, but secretly, she was trying to destroy in him the spiritual aspiration which was essential in his nature, through which she had won him as her husband, but which now could only irritate and confuse her, and stand in the way of her desires, keeping the path against them.
"Yes," he said, drawing in his breath. "We are here to-night by the Nile, and we hear the boatmen singing."
The distant singers had been silent for some minutes; now their voices were heard again, and sounded nearer to the garden, as if they were on some vessel that was drifting down the river under the brilliant stars. So much nearer was the music that Mrs. Armine could hear a word cried out by a solo voice, "Al-lah! Al-lah! Al-lah!" The voice was accompanied by a deep and monotonous murmur. The singer was beating a _daraboukkeh_ held loosely between his knees. The chorus of nasal voices joined in with the rough and artless vehemence which had in it something that was sad, and something that, though pitiless, seemed at moments to thrill with yearning, like the cruelty of the world, which is mingled with the eternal longing for the healing of its wounds.