It was Aimee who had evolved the disguise, constructing the turban from the negligee beneath her mantle, and it was Aimee who bargained with the villagers for their breakfast, eggs and goats’ milk and bread and rice, while her lord, as befitted his dignity, stayed aloof upon his steed, returning a courteous response of “Allah salimak—­God bless you” to their greetings.

Then as the day brightened and the last soft veil of mist was burned away before a blood-red sun, that pair of travelers left the highroad and turned west upon a byway that led past fields of corn and yellow water and mud villages where goats and naked babies and ragged women squatted idly in the dust, and on through low, red-granite hills swirled about with yellow sand drift and out into the desert beyond.

Here fresh vigor came to the Arab horse, and tossing his mane and stretching out his nostrils to the dry air he broke into a gallop that sent sand and pebbles flying from his hoofs.  To right and left the startled desert hares scattered, and from the clumps of spiky helga the black vultures rose in heavy-winged flight.

Then the breeze dropped, and the swift-coming heat rushed at them like a furnace breath, and slower and slower they made their way, Ryder leading the jaded horse and Aimee nodding in the saddle, mere crawling specks across the immensity of sand.

Then, in the shade of a huge clump of gray-green mit minan beside a jutting boulder they stopped at last to rest.  The horse sank on his knees; Ryder spread out his cloak and Aimee dropped down upon its folds, lost in exhausted sleep as soon as her head touched the sands.  Ryder, his back against the rock, kept watch.

It was not the exultant Ryder of that first hour of flight.  The excitement of the night had subsided and withdrawn its wild stimulation.  It was a hot and tired and immensely sobered young man who sat there with eyes that burned from lack of sleep and a brow knit into a taut and anxious line.

Realization flooded him with the sun.  Responsibility burned in upon him with the heat.

Alone in the Libyan desert he sat there, and at his feet there slept the young girl whose life he had snapped utterly off from its roots.

He was overwhelmingly responsible for her.  If she had never met him, if he had never continued to thrust himself upon her, she would have gone on her predestined way, safe, secluded, luxurious—­vaguely unhappy and mutinous at times, perhaps, in the secret stirrings of her blood, but still an indulged and wealthy little Moslem.

And now—­she lay there, like a sleeping child, the dark tendrils of hair clinging to her moist, sun-flushed cheeks, her long lashes mingling their shadows with the purple underlining of the night’s terrors, homeless, exhausted, resourceless but for that anxious-eyed young man.

Desperately he hoped that she would not wake to regret.  Even a sardonic tyrant in a palace might be preferable in the merciless daylight to a helpless young man in the Libyan desert.