“He will be dead ere the sun rises, and I beg you to forgive me if I leave you for a while, for I must go to give orders as to his death.”

Jill’s thoughts can be most aptly described as tumultuous, but her smile was a festival of youth as she watched the Arab, in whom she had put her trust, walk up the long avenue, stop, and clap his hands.

She could hear no word of the orders given to the servant, who ran from out a clump of trees to kneel at his master’s feet, but she guessed that it was the engraven emerald ring which passed from one to the other to be hidden in the servant’s turban; and she felt a wave of absolute satisfaction sweep through her whole being at the thought of the man’s death before the dawn.

At which sensation she mentally shook herself, feeling that the young tree of her experience, unrestrainedly shooting out in all directions within the space of a few hours, would require the sharp edge of the pruning knife if it was to be kept to the merest outline of the shape common to the ordinary life she had led up to now.

“It is well!  He dies before the dawn!” announced the Arab prosaically, as he came towards this woman who, on the edge of a new life which might, for all she knew, bring ruin, despair, or even death in its wake, could so tranquilly talk of the risks she had already encountered in the course of the first few steps she had taken upon the path she had chosen to follow.

“And tell me, O! woman, whose courage causes me to marvel, how once happily escaped from the house of few windows and but one apparent door, did you find your way to these gates?”

“Oh! that!” said Jill, as she sat with her hands about her knee and her face upturned to the moon, which, throwing a deep shadow from the hat brim across the upper part of her face, made of the deep eyes a mystery, and a delirious invitation of the red mouth.  “Amongst other till now useless accomplishments, I have learned to guide myself by the stars, though I’m positive they move over here.  I had noticed that big one there, which we haven’t got in England, that very big sparkling one, hung over the quarter in which the waiting-maid told me lay your house.”

“Yes!” replied the man who, though he knew the West so well, was secretly wondering at the trait in a character which allowed a woman, on the edge of something unknown, fraught, perhaps, with every kind of danger, to talk unconcernedly of hotels, face creams, blue doors, and stars.  “That is the Star of Happiness, it hangs also right in the middle of my oasis, right over my desert dwelling,” and the string of beads hanging from the waist slipped through the long fingers as words of prayer fell softly on the perfumed air.

The girl got up and walked over to the camels.

“So I followed my star and suddenly found myself at the gates!  Is this my ship of the desert—­and what a beautiful coat, the dear thing,” starting back as the dear thing turned its bead suddenly, bared its teeth and snarled.