Of this she was quite sure.
"Well?" she said. "Go on!"
"I had been busy all that day in my office finishing up my work. I
turned the key in the door at ten o'clock, thinking with relief that for
six weeks I should not open it, and I strolled northward out of Wadi
Halfa along the Nile bank into the little town of Tewfikieh. As I
entered the main street I saw a small crowd--Arabs, negroes, a Greek or
two, and some Egyptian soldiers, standing outside the cafe, and lit up
by a glare of light from within. As I came nearer I heard the sound of a
violin and a zither, both most vilely played, jingling out a waltz. I
stood at the back of the crowd and looked over the shoulders of the men
in front of me into the room. It was a place of four bare whitewashed
walls; a bar stood in one corner, a wooden bench or two were ranged
against the walls, and a single unshaded paraffin lamp swung and glared
from the ceiling. A troupe of itinerant musicians were playing to that
crowd of negroes and Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the
price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see,
all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both
old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced
fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of
face, unwieldy of body.
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