But, for all that, he frowned above her curly head, because he had all the Englishman’s horror of scandal in connection with any of his women-folk; but he set his teeth and crushed her up closer, then let her go suddenly and swung her round, pointing across to the west.

“Look, darling; look!”

And the tears streamed down the girl’s face as she flung out her arms.

“Irja Sooltan!” she called. “Irja Sooltan!”

Her voice carried on the still air like the note of a bell over water.

And the stallion, who had broken from his sayis as he was being led from the stable in readiness for the sad procession to the river, and who, terrified at the sight of the burning tents, had rushed on in search of his master, stopped dead, with his head up and tail and mane streaming in the wind.

He had not found his master, but he knew the voice that called.

“Irja Sooltan!” it came again. “Irja! Irja!”

And he reared and wheeled in the direction from whence it came, then raced to where he saw the girl standing.

He stamped, and whinnied, and nuzzled her hand and her shoulder as she stood in her lover’s arms.

“Tell me you will marry me, sweetheart,” Ben Kelham was saying, with one hand on the stallion’s bridle.  “Say it, Damaris.”

She shook her head and looked up piteously, with tears in her wonderful eyes, as she made a great sacrifice to her honour.

“I can’t, Ben,” she whispered.   “I—­I—­Oh!   I can’t tell you—­I
haven’t--the courage--Oh!   Ben, you would never understand------”

He gave a great shout as he leapt to the saddle and took the stallion back a hundred yards, then wheeled him and raced him back along his tracks.

“Understand, beloved?” he cried, as he bent as he rushed past her at full speed and lifted her to the saddle.  “There is nothing to understand.”  And he turned the stallion as he spoke and headed him towards the tents.  “We will just go back, dear; we will just pass to say goodbye—­together.”

And they swept across the desert.

Then he reined in the stallion and sat staring, then whispered, as he bent and kissed the bonny curls: 

“The way out, dear; the way out.  Someone is waiting for us.”

Stubbornly, heavily, across the desert, with occasional pauses for rest and investigation of the track of small footprints, and the horizon, came Wellington.

He was very hot and very thirsty, and it seemed to him that he had been walking for many days through many, many endless deserts, but he intended to criss-cross the Sahara, or any other desert, through all eternity, until he could deliver the book he held between his formidable teeth to his beloved mistress.

And she slid from the saddle, and knelt, and put her arms around him, and took the somewhat moist keepsake from him.