The burning words, uttered low, in that strange, strained voice she hardly recognised, fell upon Silka like drops of molten lead.  Her sister seemed mad:  her eyes started forward from her livid face:  her clasp on Silka’s wrists gripped like iron.  Silka’s heart was overwhelmed with pity and distress.

“How can I?” she murmured back, bewildered by the sudden revelation of misery in the other—­this other that had grown up with her, played with her, slept with her side by side through the soft, hot nights when they had lain counting the stars through a chink in the tent.  Side by side their bodies had nestled together, and side by side their hearts had always been.

“You have but to unveil your face to the Sheik,” returned the other quickly, eagerly, almost furiously, “and he will take you instead of me.  Think, Silka! the head of the tribe, fifty camels, a thousand goats—­” She stopped in her eager outpour of persuasion.  Silka was looking at her straight from under her dark, level brows, her lips curled in a sorrowful disdain.

“Have his riches any weight with you, Doolga?  Why do you offer them to me?” she said proudly.

“Because you are free:  you do not love,” impetuously returned the other with glib, persistent vehemence.  “I would marry the Sheik, I would prize his flocks, his riches; but I love—­I love—­I cannot!”

“Whom do you love so much?” replied Silka sadly.  “Why have you not told me?  Who is he?”

The girls were seated on the bed in one corner of the tent close beside its stretched canvas wall.  There was a little eyelet, a square hole with a flap buttoned down over it, on a level with their heads.  At Silka’s question Doolga turned to the canvas, and, with an impatient movement, tore up the flap and looked out.  The plain was bathed in gold:  above, the pure, pink glow still hung in the limpid sky.  The encampment was astir.  The tents were open, and little cooking fires, sending up their spirals of blue smoke were dotted over the sand.  At a few paces’ distance from the main row of tents, the camels, lying down, made a velvet-like patch of shade on the gleaming gold of the sand, and herds of white goats stood near, their silky coats flashing in the morning sunlight.  Silka looked out, too, over her sister’s shoulder.  She saw the burnished gold of the plain and the luminous sky, and between these two a figure that stood by a low brown tent, with the sunlight falling full on its noble brow and the straight profile turned towards them.  Doolga wrung Silka’s hand, that she still clutched, as they knelt side by side on the sheepskin looking through the eyelet.

“That is he!” she said, and Silka’s lips parted suddenly in a little scream of pain.

“What is the matter?” asked Doolga roughly, drawing her back from the aperture, and letting the flap fall.

“You hurt me,” replied Silka.  “Is that the one you love?” Her voice sounded tremulous:  her eyes, fixed on Doolga, seemed to widen with increasing pain.