But it seems that her recovery of spirits did not last out the night.  Doubts assailed her—­Harry Luttrell was beneath other skies with other preoccupations and no message from him had ever come to her.  Even if his love was unchanged at Stockholm, it might not be so now.  Hillyard rang her up on the telephone the next morning and warm in his sympathy asked her to lunch with him.  But it was a pitiful little voice which replied to him.  Stella Croyle answered from her bed.  She was not well.  She would stay in bed for a day and then go to a little cottage which she owned in the country.  She would see Hillyard again next year when he returned from the East.

“Yes, that’s her way,” said Sir Charles Hardiman.  He met Hillyard the day before he sailed for Port Said and questioned him about Stella Croyle discreetly.  “She runs to earth when she’s unhappy.  We shall not see her for a couple of months.  No one will.”

CHAPTER V

HILLYARD’S MESSENGER

Hillyard turned his back upon the pools of the Khor Galagu at the end of April and wandered slowly down the River Dinder.  From time to time his shikari would lead his camels and camp-servants out on to an open clearing on the high river bank and announce a name still marked upon the maps.  Once there had been a village here, before the Kalifa sent his soldiers and herded the tribes into the towns for his better security.  Now there was no sign anywhere of habitation.  The red boles of the mimosa trees, purple-brown cracked earth, yellow stubble of burnt grass, the skimming of myriads of birds above the tree-tops and shy wild animals gliding noiselessly in the dark of the forest—­there was nothing more now.  It seemed that no human foot had ever trodden that region.

Hillyard’s holiday was coming to an end, for in a month the rainy season would begin and this great park become a marsh.  He went fluctuating between an excited eagerness for a renewal of rivalry and the interchange of ideas and the companionship of women; and a reluctance to leave a country which had so restored him to physical well-being.  Never had he been so strong.  He had recaptured, after his five years of London confinement, the swift spring of the muscles, the immediate response of the body to the demand made upon it, and the glorious cessation of fatigue when after arduous hours of heat and exertion he stretched himself upon his camp-chair in the shadow of his tent.  On the whole he travelled northwards reluctantly; until he came to a little open space ten days away from the first village he would touch.