At the same hour, lower down the Nile, at Omdurman, the river lay calm now, without a ripple, and bathed in gold; a stream of liquid gold it seemed, asleep between its deep-green banks, and only now and then did a white-sailed felucca glide by in the golden evening light.

Two figures came down from the desert to the Nile out of the flat, heated air of the plain to the divine freshness by the water.  Here, in the cool, golden light, they paused slow and reluctant to part.

“Good-night, Merla!  Are you unhappy that I must go?”

The girl raised her face, and looked at him with steadfast eyes.

“The sun gilds the black rock, but the rock cannot expect the sun to stay.  I am quite happy.  Good-night!”

Another moment and the little launch had sprung out from the deep shadowed bank on to the golden surface, and was steaming, amidst the gold and rosy ripples, back to Khartoum.

When Merla reached the little enclosure of stamped clay round her hut, she saw a new camel feeding there, and cried out for joy.  She ran to it and clasped her hands about its velvet neck, and called to her father, as he sat smoking at the doorway, a dozen questions.  Where had it come from?  Whose was it?  But the old man only chuckled and laughed, and would not answer.

“No, no,” he thought, watching her with pride, as she played round the camel, “let the maiden wait to know the joy in store for her till the full moon; she is but a child.”

Stanhope went that night to a dance at the palace at Khartoum, but he was late in arriving, and seemed very dull and absent-minded when he came, and flattered the women less than usual.  “He used to be such a nice boy when he first came here,” they complained amongst themselves, “but he was quite horrid to-night—­he must be in love,” and they all laughed, for every one knew there was no one in Khartoum to fall in love with except themselves, and he had not led any one of them to suppose she was the favoured one.

CHAPTER II

The night was calm, and in the purple, star-filled sky the moon was rising.  It was at the full.  The naphtha launch was on the river, but it moved silently; current was with it, and the light airs favourable, so there was no need of the engine; one single sail carried the boat easily over the buoyant water.  The stars and the rising moon gleamed in the smooth, black ripples.  Stanhope sat in the boat thinking, wrapped in a cruel reverie.

He felt he had sailed the craft of his life too near the perilous shore of unconventionality, and now he saw the rocks ahead of him plainly, on which it would be torn in pieces.  Yet how to turn back, or move the helm to steer away from them?

“A month ago,” he thought, as his eye caught the reflection of the rising moon in the water, “when that moon was young, I was free.  Not a soul cared for me, whether I lived or died, and I cared for no one.”  Now there was one, he knew, who lived upon his coming, whose feet ran to meet him, whose eyes strained their vision to see his first approach.  And he, too; he was no longer free.  His heart went out to that other heart, beating for him alone so truly, so faithfully, full of such unquestioning adoration and obedience, in mud-walled sun-parched Omdurman.