“My dear old chap, I hope you’re not hurt?” said Belmont, laying his hand upon Cochrane’s knee.

The Colonel had straightened himself, though he still gasped a little in his breathing.

“I am all right again, now.  Would you kindly show me which was the man who struck me?”

“It was the fellow in front there—­with his camel beside Fardet’s.”

“The young fellow with the moustache—­I can’t see him very well in this light, but I think I could pick him out again.  Thank you, Belmont!”

“But I thought some of your ribs were gone.”

“No, it only knocked the wind out of me.”

“You must be made of iron.  It was a frightful blow.  How could you rally from it so quickly?”

The Colonel cleared his throat and hummed and stammered.

“The fact is, my dear Belmont—­I’m sure you would not let it go further—­above all not to the ladies; but I am rather older than I used to be, and rather than lose the military carriage which has always been dear to me, I—­”

“Stays, be Jove!” cried the astonished Irishman.

“Well, some slight artificial support,” said the Colonel stiffly, and switched the conversation off to the chances of the morrow.

It still comes back in their dreams to those who are left, that long night’s march in the desert.  It was like a dream itself, the silence of it as they were borne forward upon those soft, shuffling sponge feet, and the flitting, flickering figures which oscillated upon every side of them.  The whole universe seemed to be hung as a monstrous time-dial in front of them.  A star would glimmer like a lantern on the very level of their path.  They looked again, and it was a hand’s-breadth up, and another was shining beneath it.  Hour after hour the broad stream flowed sedately across the deep blue background, worlds and systems drifting majestically overhead, and pouring over the dark horizon.  In their vastness and their beauty there was a vague consolation to the prisoners; for their own fate, and their own individuality, seemed trivial and unimportant amid the play of such tremendous forces.  Slowly the grand procession swept across the heaven, first climbing, then hanging long with little apparent motion, and then sinking grandly downwards, until away in the east the first cold grey glimmer appeared, and their own haggard faces shocked each other’s sight.

The day had tortured them with its heat, and now the night had brought the even more intolerable discomfort of cold.  The Arabs swathed themselves in their gowns and wrapped up their heads.  The prisoners beat their hands together and shivered miserably.  Miss Adams felt it most, for she was very thin, with the impaired circulation of age.  Stephens slipped off his Norfolk jacket and threw it over her shoulders.  He rode beside Sadie, and whistled and chatted to make here believe that her aunt was really relieving him by carrying his jacket for him, but the attempt was