The raging wind swept past them in sheets of dust, bellowing as it went.  He knelt on her body; his hands ground into her neck.  Through the darkness he saw beneath him the thin, white oval of the face, with its eyes bulging, starting out of the head, its lips writhing in agony; two white hands beat helplessly in the black air beside him.  He looked hard into her eyes, bending down to her close, very near, as his hands sank deeper into her neck, his fingers locked more tightly round it.  In a few seconds the light of the eyes went out, the hands ceased to beat the air.  Saidie was avenged.  With a laugh that rang out into the noise of the storm, the man got up from the limp body and stood by it, in the echoing darkness.  Then he kicked it, so that it rolled over, and the sand came up in waves eager to bury it.

In an hour woman, sedan chair, lantern would all be beneath a level plain of sand.

He turned back towards the bungalow.  “Saidie,” he murmured, and the storm-wind seemed to rave “Saidie!” “Saidie!” round him, to whirl the name upwards to the dim stars, glimmering one here and there, far off and veiled in the heavens.  He went back; the wind helped him.  On its wings he seemed borne back to his house, through the tortured garden, through the gaping doorway, over the shattered door he passed, and then up the stairs to their room.

After the inferno of the desert the inside of the house seemed quiet, and in their room the lamps burned steadily, but low.  Their oil was used up, their life, like his, was nearly done.  The bed stood there and on its calm white stillness lay Saidie, waiting for him, for him alone, as always.

He went up to her and stood there.

“Saidie?” but she did not answer.  He lay down beside her gently, so as not to break her slumber, and then drew her to his breast.  Ah his treasure! his world!  Surely now all was well since she was safe in his arms!  He did not feel the deathly coldness.  There was a whizzing in his brain where Nature had laid her finger on a vein, and broken it that he might be released from sorrow and die.

“Saidie?” he murmured again as her breast pressed his, and put his lips to hers.

As his life had first dawned in her kiss, so it went back now to the lips that had given it, and in that kiss he died.

II

There was complete silence in the large room, filled with long, wavering shadows that the flickering firelight chased over the walls and amongst the gilt-edged tables.

Beyond the windows the dusk was gathering quickly in the wind-swept street, beneath the leaden sky.  From the pane nearest the fire a side-light fell across a man’s figure leaning against the corner of the mantel-shelf.  A ruddy glow from the hearth struck upon the silk skirt of a girl leaning back in the easy-chair beneath the other corner.

Her face is lost in the shadow.