From a big, bamboo Chinese chair the woman was watching him.

Her eyes were musing, reminiscent.  Her riding-costume well became her; and by the flush on her cheek you might have guessed they had both just come in from a long gallop together.

The costume gave her a kind of boyish charm; yet she remained entirely feminine.  A kind of bronze mist seemed to envelop her head, as the dull-tawny sunset light fell on her from those broad windows.  Near her riding-crop stood a Hindu incense-holder, with joss-sticks burning.  As she took one of these and twirled it contemplatively, the blue-gray vapor spiraling upward was no more dreamy than her eyes.

“The invincible Orient!” she said, all at once.  “It absorbs everything and gives back nothing.  And we thought, we hoped, we might conquer part of it!  Well—­no—­that’s not done.”

The man stopped his slow pacing, sat on the edge of the table and drummed with his fingers on the teak.

“Not at the first attempt, anyhow,” said he, after a little thought.  “I think, though, another time—­but there’s no use dreaming.  Of course, it’s not the treasure I’m thinking about.  That was just a detail.  It’s the men.  Good men!”

She peered into the incense-smoke, as if exorcising the powers of darkness.

“They’re not dead, not all of them!” she exclaimed with conviction.

“I wish I could believe you!”

“But you must believe me!  Something tells me some of our good chaps are still alive.  All of them perhaps.”

“Impossible!” He shook his head.  “Even if they escaped the explosion, the Jannati Shahr devils must have massacred them.”  He shuddered slightly.  “That’s the worst of it.  Death is all right.  But the crucifixion, and all—­”

“Cold reason paints a cruel picture, I admit,” the woman answered, laying a hand on the man’s.  “But you know—­a woman’s intuition.  I don’t believe as you do.  And the major—­and that rumor we got from old Nasr ed Din, the Hejaz rug-merchant down on Hester Street, how about that?”

“Yes, I know.  But—­”

“How could a rumor like that come through, about a big, white-skinned, red-haired Ajam slave held by that tribe near Jeddah?  How could it, unless there were some truth back of it?”

“He wandered away into the desert, quite insane.  It’s not impossible he might have been captured.  By Allah!” And the man struck the table hard.  “If I really believed Nasr ed Din—­”

“Well?”

“I’d go again, if I died for it!”

“The pronoun’s wrong. We’d go!”

“Yes, we!” He took her hand.  “We’d trail that rumor down and have Bohannan out of there, and the others too, if—­but no, no, the thing’s impossible!”

“Nothing is impossible, I tell you, in the East.  And haven’t we had miracles enough?  After we were judged pirates and condemned to die, by the International Aero Tribunal, wasn’t it a miracle about that pardon?  That immunity, for your vibratory secrets that have revolutionized the defensive tactics of the League’s air-forces?”