Mr. Taylor from the caravan, to promise inoffensive companionship down the Red Sea. Calm was the prospect. But Eliza is Eliza. And we have not yet seen Eliza in close contact with another lady. Nor have we yet seen Mrs. Tulloch.
IV
The beauty of the Gulf of Suez—and surely it is most beautiful—has never received full appreciation from the traveller. He is in too much of a hurry to arrive or to depart, his eyes are too ardently bent on England or on India for him to enjoy that exquisite corridor of tinted mountains and radiant water. He is too much occupied with his own thoughts to realize that here, here and nowhere else, is the vestibule between the Levant and the Tropics. Nor was it otherwise in the case of Mrs. Fay. As she sailed southward with her husband in the pleasant autumn weather, her thoughts dwelt on the past with irritation, on the future with hope, but on the scenery scarcely at all. What with the boredom of Alexandria, what with her fright at Cairo, what with the native dress that fanaticism had compelled her to wear ("a terrible fashion for one like me to whom fresh air seems the greatest requisite for existence"), and finally what with Suez, which she found "a miserable place little better than the desert which it bounds," she quitted Egypt without one tender word. Even her Biblical reminiscences take an embittered turn. She forgets how glad Jacob had been to come there and only remembers how anxious Moses and Aaron had been to get away.
