Leave that corner piece of pasture unhedged, and it’s odds on that not a single soul will tramp or want to tramp over it, from one year’s end to another; hedge it, close it with padlocked gate, prop up the warning re trespassers and see if you don’t find a wide track of footprints across it in the morning.

Yes; the picture was biblical.

Rebecca must have worn exactly the same fashioned clothes as this woman, and doubtless Leah had become pink-eyed through the tears of vexation she had shed over the ancestral humped quadruped she had ridden; and most certainly Lot’s wife, Ruth, Solomon’s wives and appendages, Jezebel, and every other woman mentioned in the Bible once watched just such a dawn rise across just such a desert.

We change our fashions, our fixed opinions, the colour of our hair and the pattern of our socks when the fancy seizes us, but neither time nor man has changed the desert—­so far.  Thank heaven for it, there is still one place left in which we can go to die or be re-born—­in seemly solitude.

The grief of Rachel was shadowed upon the face of Jill, the wife of the Arab, as she sat quite still, looking down at the pool of orange light flung from the tent out onto the sand; then she sighed, the little sigh of the anxious heart which, like the wind that springs up and sweeps over your dwelling, and is gone, heralding the storm, is the forerunner of the grief which will ere long overwhelm you.

She knew!

The lover, the wife, the brother, the friend, can temporarily blind themselves with the blinkers of false hope and can blunt the stabbing spear of hideous fear with sharp-edged reasoning, but the mother—­never.

You cannot deceive her with a smile, nor can distance hide your distress from her; you cannot, if you could be so minded, conceal your joy from her, nor can you hurt her with a wound that will not heal.

Go to her with your hands swelling from the sting of the wasp you found in the stolen fruit, or stained with crime; or your shoes wet through with the mire of the by-ways in which you have been straying, and what will she do?  She will sit you down in front of the glowing fire of her love, warm your straying feet, wash away the stain in the bitter waters of her tears, and then dry them with her smile.

And you can go on straying—­if you could be so minded—­until seven million seventy-times-seven, and you will find her just the same.

It is not forgiveness; it is Love.

And it was Love which, when there came no answer to her call, urged
Jill to get her camel to its knees.

Over twenty years had passed since Jill Carden, the English girl, had first tried her ’prentice hand upon the obstreperous camel.  She had ridden out into the desert under the stars with her desert lover; she had, strong in a great love, fearlessly climbed the high wall of racial distinction crowned with the spikes of custom and convention; she had watched the seed of happiness burst and blossom until it had grown into a great tree; but she had forgotten that no tree, however deep its roots, however strong its branches, is safe, so long as Fate, in senile jealousy, can tear the heavens into ribbons with her hellish lightning.