British -- Egypt -- Fiction; Egypt -- Fiction; Kidnapping -- Fiction; Love stories
She crossed the tent to the little bookcase and knelt beside it
curiously. What did a Francophile-Arab read? Novels, probably, that
would harmonise with the atmosphere that she dimly sensed in her
surroundings. But it was not novels that filled the bookcase. They were
books of sport and travel with several volumes on veterinary surgery.
They were all in French, and had all been frequently handled, many of
them had pencilled notes in the margins written in Arabic. One shelf
was filled entirely with the works of one man, a certain Vicomte Raoul
de Saint Hubert. With the exception of one novel, which Diana only
glanced at hastily; they were all books of travel. From the few
scribbled words in the front of each Diana could see that they had all
been sent to the Arab by the author himself--one even was dedicated to
"My friend, Ahmed Ben Hassan, Sheik of the Desert." She put the books
back with a puzzled frown. She wished, with a feeling that she could
not fathom, that they had been rather what she had imagined. The
evidence of education and unlooked-for tastes in the man they belonged
to troubled her. It was an unexpected glimpse into the personality of
the Arab that had captured her was vaguely disquieting, for it
suggested possibilities that would not have existed in a raw native, or
one only superficially coated with a veneer of civilisation. He seemed
to become infinitely more sinister, infinitely more horrible. She
looked at her watch with sudden apprehension. The day was wearing away
quickly. Soon he would come. Her breath came quick and short and the
tears welled up in her eyes.
"I mustn't! I mustn't!" she whispered in a kind of desperation. "If I
cry again I shall go mad." She forced them back, and crossing to the
big black divan that she had scorned before dropped down among the soft
cushions. She was so tired, and her head throbbed persistently.
She was asleep when the servant brought tea, but she started up as he
put the tray on a stool beside her.
"It is Madame's own tea. If she will be good enough to say if it is
made to her taste," he said anxiously, as if his whole happiness was
contained in the tiny teapot at which he was frowning deprecatingly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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