They sat down on the sand in a triangular patch of shade. Lucilla regarded him with approbation. “I love to hear you talk vehemently,” she remarked. “It’s because I have learned to feel vehemently,” said Martin. “Since when?” “Since I first met you,” said Martin, with sudden daring. “It’s not my example you’ve been profiting by,” she laughed. “You’ve never heard me raving at a poor old mummy.” Cool and casual, she warded off the shaft of his implied declaration. He had not another weapon to hand. He said: “You’ve said things equally violent when you have felt deeply. That is your great power. You live intensely. Everything you do you put your whole self into. You have the faculty of making everybody around you do the same.” At that moment Mr. Watney-Holcombe appeared at the mouth of the tomb, mopping his rubicund face. At Lucilla he shook a playful fist. “Not another darned monument for me this day.” “I don’t seem to have succeeded with him, anyway,” she said in a low and ironical voice. Martin, gentlest of creatures, felt towards Mr. Watney-Holcombe for the moment as he had felt towards Amen-Hetep. The rosy-faced gentleman sat beside them and talked flippantly of gods and goddesses; and soon the rest of the party joined them. The opportunity for which Martin had waited so long, of which he had dreamed the extravagant dreams of an imaginative child, was gone. He would have to wait yet further. But he had spoken as he had never before dared to speak. He had told her unmistakably that she had taught him to feel and to live. As the other ladies approached he sprang to his feet and held out a hand to aid the divinity to rise. She accepted it frankly, nodded him pleasant thanks. The pressure of her little moist palm kept him a-tingle for long afterwards. They had a gay and intimate ride home. The donkey boys thwacked the donkeys so that they galloped to the shattering of sustained conversation between the riders. But in one breathing space, while they jogged along side by side, she said: “If I have done anything to help you on your way, I regard it as a privilege.” “You’ve done everything for me,” said Martin. “To whom else but you do I owe all this?” His gesture embraced earth and sky. “I only made a suggestion,” said Lucilla. “You’ve done infinitely more. Anybody giving advice could say: ‘Go to Egypt.’ You said, ‘Come to Egypt,’ and therein lies all the difference. You have given me of yourself, so bountifully, so generously——” He paused. “Go on,” she said. “I love to hear you talk.” But the donkey-boys perceiving Mr. Dangerfield mounted on a fleet quadruped about to break through the advance guard, thwacked the donkeys again, and Martin, unless he shouted breathlessly, could not go on talking.