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For once the agents’ rose-coloured forecast of the voyage proved to be correct. The steamer did not meet with bad weather, nor did her engines break down, and she accomplished the distance in rather less than the average time, but Lady Haigh refused to listen to Cecil’s plea for a day or two in Alexandria, and insisted on hurrying on at once to Cairo.

“My dear,” she said, “all this”—with a contemptuous wave of her hand towards the fine houses on either side of the broad street through which they were driving—“all this is modern, European, French, tasteless! You want to enjoy your first sight of Eastern life, you say? Very well, then thank me for taking you at once where you will really see it, and not this wretched half-imitation.”

“But the sky! the palm-trees! the people! the colours, Lady Haigh!” cried Cecil in an ecstasy.

“Nonsense, my dear—nothing to what you will see at Cairo!” and Cecil was forced to be content.

A short railway journey brought them to Cairo, and they found Mr Boleyn, Lady Haigh’s brother-in-law, waiting to meet them. They drove to his house in a luxurious carriage, with running footmen and a magnificent coachman, and Cecil left the talk to her two companions, and gave herself up to the enjoyment of the new pictures which met her eye on every side. It seemed to her that she would have liked that drive to go on for ever, and she was genuinely sorry, tired though she was, to reach the Boleyns’ house, although she ought to have felt more sympathy for Lady Haigh, who had not seen her sister for over twenty years. It seemed to Cecil, however, that both ladies would have acquiesced cheerfully in an even longer separation, for they could not forget the time when Lady Haigh had been a clever and irrepressible younger sister, and Mrs Boleyn had felt it her duty systematically to snub her. Life in the tropics had not suited the elder sister as well as it had the younger, and Mrs Boleyn was tall and gaunt and withered, with a tendency to exult over Lady Haigh, because she (Mrs Boleyn) had always said that Elma would soon be tired of her studies and her talk about Women’s Rights, and would marry like other people.