As in a flash she saw the wreck she had made of her life by throwing away the substance of a good man’s love for the fantastic conviction that, as she was not as other girls, she must therefore go a-venturing through the world’s mazy high-ways and by-ways until she had found her own particular niche.

She saw the picture of herself proclaiming it to her life by throwing away the substance of a good man’s godmother’s letter of invitation to Egypt.  She saw the girl’s lips moving.  What was she saying?

“I want to find my own nail and hang for one hour by myself, if it’s on a barn door or the wall of a mosque—­as long as I am by myself.”

Then the picture faded, to give place to another in which she saw herself sitting in the moonlight beside Ben Kelham; the honest, slow, lovable man standing at that very moment a grim picture of despair, divided only by a curtain from her, through whom, indirectly, he had killed his friend.

What was she saying to him in this dream-picture?

“I don’t know enough to marry; I want to know what love really is, first . . .”

What was he saying in reply?

“. . .  You will learn your lesson all right, dear, and suffer a bit, dear, but you will come to me in the end.”

She suddenly knelt and plunged her hand down into the water, breaking the smooth surface into a thousand miniature waves which turned, as she stared, into the mocking smiles of her acquaintances and friends; and she knelt quite still until the surface was once more smooth, out of which, as she stared, looked the tragic face of the dead man’s mother and the grief-stricken, shamed face of her beloved godmother.

The gossip, the scandal, with her name linked as lover to that dead man; the chuckles, the sly lifting of eyebrow and pursing of lips when it should be known that the other man, the dead man’s greatest friend, had come upon them unawares, alone in the tent at night?

The story of this struggle, the shooting of the treacherous friend—­for who would believe the story, told by the principals in the drama, of a wounded lion which had turned and disappeared into the night?

There would be the inquest, the inquiry, the arrest for murder and the trial, in which she and all those she loved would be pilloried, through her fault, in the eyes of the world.

She stared down at the water, which seemed to hold her hands in the icy grip of death—­her hands—­look! what was that?—­what had happened to them?

They were spotted with red!

She tore at her handkerchief and rubbed them; under the water, rubbed hard, rubbed frantically, but the red spots were there on her hands, on her handkerchief, on the water—­the red she had seen when she had looked . . .

She flung the handkerchief from her and rose to her feet, shaking convulsively from head to foot.

Poor child!  Half-crazed from horror, light-headed from fatigue and want of food, she had mistaken the reflection of the jewelled Hawk she wore at her breast, thrown by the lamp upon the water, for the stain she had seen and which had looked like a crimson rose above the heart of Hugh Carden Ali, as he lay asleep, with his feet turned towards Mecca.