Anne settled herself in the stern with a sigh of sheer joy. Beneath a large sun hat, her shadowed eyes looked like shining green pools in a dark forest. "Wail of shadoof, song of sakieh, how I love it," she murmured. She gazed upon the shore, where polished brown bodies bent rhythmically over their world-old task. "If you hadn't taken a holiday this year, Vittorio, I don't know how I should ever have borne it. Let me see, it's three years since we were last in Assuan, isn't it?" "Yes, but you know you hated to leave the boys, Anne. As for me, I wouldn't have enjoyed it without you." His eyes rested upon her fondly. "How are you enjoying your second honeymoon, cara?" He slipped a proprietary arm about her slim waist. Anne laughed happily and looked askance at the gorgeously-appareled dragoman sitting in the bow with the two sailors. "Really, Vittorio, after ten years of the matrimonial yoke, your devotion deserves honorable mention." One eye still upon the dragoman, she squeezed his hand surreptitiously. "Will you never remember you're married to an old woman? I'll be forty-three in a few months. Heigh-ho!" Above the mock-tragic sigh her smile was divinely careless, divinely assured. The smile of a woman who knows in every fiber of her being that she is loved. And indeed the years had changed Anne almost not at all. A trifle less slim, her beauty had deepened and perfected in the mold. Brilliant, undimmed, her hair shone like beaten copper beneath the drooping brim of the leghorn. A little lined, quite gray, certainly more distinguished than before, Vittorio pressed against her side. "Forty-three! Do you call that a great age, foolish one? You are fishing! You know perfectly well that you are as beautiful as ever. If I were jealous, I shouldn't have a moment's peace with the raft of men you always have about you, at home in Florence--and the idle brutes at the hotel here, who seem to have nothing to do but to ogle you from the time you appear in the morning until you disappear at night with my most fortunate self. Some day I expect to be murdered by one of your miserable victims!" "Old villain, if one of your revered colleagues could hear you now! The celebrated Torrigiani, discoverer of famous relics of infamous royalties, making love to his own wife as they float along the Nile. Why, even the Pharaohs would laugh at you for an old-fashioned frump, although it couldn't have been such a terrible task to be faithful to as many wives as they had!" As they neared the end of the long island, the branching Nile curved broadly. Myriads of tiny islands like diving seals glutted the waters. Beyond on the shore, the green stopped abruptly, and rolling amber sands stretched palely golden beneath a sky of melted turquoise. Girdled by palms, shod with roses, a pink villa nestled within its garden. From the awninged terrace the sound of faint music wafted upon the scented air, rose above the wail of the shadoof.