Wrapped in her satin cloak, she walked wearily on and on.  Her eyes were wide open, staring in a terrible fatigue; she saw nothing; her heelless slippers were torn to shreds, her feet were bleeding; she felt nothing.  Not once did she look up or back or round.  Had she done so, she might have noticed that her footprints in the sand were describing a circle, as our footprints do when we are lost in the bush or the desert.

The shadows had gone, and the sands stretched a carpet of rose and grey and gold before her; the sky a canopy of blue and grey and purple above.

Like a lighthouse of Hope, Day was flashing his golden beams across the sky, a message to the weary who have toiled through the night.

And then, with one great leap he sprang clear of the horizon, just as Damaris stopped.

She looked back in the direction in which she thought she had come.  There was no sign of the tents; there could not be; they were not out of sight, but merely wrapped in the mist which, sometimes rises as a fog in the desert at dawn.

“Let me die soon! let me die soon!”

A great sob shook her as she prayed the prayer of the weak.  How much easier is it to stand at the window, with the police battering at the door, and, stimulated by its morbid interest, blow out our brains before the gaping crowd—­which will, by the way, take exactly the same morbid interest in the shooting of a horse in the street—­than to retire into the silence of the prison-cell or seclusion of the tideless backwater, and there work out our salvation amongst those who do not know if our name is Smith or Jones or Brown—­and much less care!

In the intensity of her prayer she clasped her hands upon the jewelled symbol upon her breast and looked up.

From out of the west, cleaving the air like a thrown spear, flying straight towards the sun in greeting, there came a hawk.  Up, up it sped, as though to pierce the very heavens; then hovered, wheeled and swooped downwards above the girl.  She flung out her arms as its symbol struck through her clouded senses, and unconsciously called the “Luring Call” she had heard but once, when she had first seen the man, who lay asleep in the tent, in the market-place of the Arabian quarter in Cairo.

Sweet and clear her voice rose through the morning air, rising until the bird caught the sound and, just as she swayed and fell, swooped.

Down it came, straighter than a shaft of rain; swept across her like the wind; rose; and sailed away.

There was no call to bring it back now.  The falconer who had thrown it, as was the custom, at sunrise, was upon his knees with his forehead upon the ground, in sign of a great grief, taking no notice of his master’s favourite shahin which he had petted and trained.  It flew towards the rising sun; it flew away; it was never seen again.

Perhaps, after all, had it heard its master’s call?