"Yes. She had one of the most lovely bodies I've ever seen." Ursula turned her head and looked up at him with a faint twinkle of amusement in her eyes. "But--but----" Paul stammered for words. Yet even so, the girl by his side, with her serene smile, began to master his excitement by her mere cool presence. "But, Ursula, it was a disgraceful thing." "Oh? You didn't seem to think so while you watched. Personally, I thought it was wonderfully beautiful." "But in that place!" "Exactly. Like a fresh flower on a dust-heap. Naturally I picked up her gift." "But you can't justify it," he protested in bewilderment that grew with every sentence. "It was grossly immoral." "Immoral?" "Yes. You know it." Paul was emphatic. "What was immoral then? The flower? The dust-heap? The girl's body? The dance? Ugly or beautiful, perhaps, but immoral? What do you mean?" "Well, it appealed to the worst passions in everyone, to the animal in us, in--in me." "It appealed to you sensually no doubt. Your mind, informed by your senses, appreciated the animal grace and beauty. Why not? Are animals immoral?" "That was a girl though, a human being, a--a----" "And isn't a girl an animal? Are you and I not animals?" "We've souls anyway." "Are you so sure animals haven't souls? How do you know? What is a soul, Paul?" "A soul?" queried Paul. "Well..." (He stumbled desperately.) "The immortal part of us, the home of the spirit, a bit of God." "God?" Her tone instantly arrested him. There, in the night, picking their way down the road-to-be over the sand of the desert, the blare of the music behind them in the distance, he was arrested again. He was quick enough to see it with the swiftness of thought. God! Everything came back to God. And where was God? And if there was no God, where was morality? Ursula put her hand on his arm. It was rather like Chanctonbury all over again, he thought instantly, and smiled involuntarily at the thought. Here, in Egypt, in the whirl of new experience, her touch on his arm brought back the song of the lark and the vision of the English sun on the fields and woods round Steyning. And she knew it. "You old dear," she said. "What about the beggar's clay? Is clay magical in plants and flowers, and sinful in human bodies?" "But that sort of thing outrages the moral law," he objected, soberly. She laughed a very little. "Has God spoken His laws so clearly, Paul?" she said. "I thought you had come to the conclusion that He was rather silent." "But there must be a moral law! Why, good heavens..." "Then where is the moral Lawgiver?" she demanded, instantly. _Where is the moral Lawgiver?_ "Where!" The word echoed in his consciousness, and he knew that he had no answer. Tramping over the sand, tramping through the night, he saw to what he had come, or thought he saw. Thus soon was Muriel answered.