It was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him in—­with the feeling that these few days and nights had been immeasurable, and that he had been away a thousand years.  He came back with the magic of the Desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless and insipid by comparison.  To human impressions thus he was fresh and vividly sensitive.  His being, cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur, “felt” people—­for a time at any rate—­with an uncommon sharpness of receptive judgment.  He returned to a life somehow mean and meagre, resuming insignificance with his dinner jacket.  Out with the sand he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted self-conscious and reduced.

But this imperial standard of the Desert stayed a little time beside him, its purity focussing judgment like a lens.  The specks of smaller emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over the people assembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid shock upon two figures at the little table facing him.

He had forgotten Vance, the Birmingham man who sought the North at midnight with a pocket compass.  He now saw him again, with an intuitive discernment entirely fresh.  Before memory brought up her clouding associations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him.  “That man,” Henriot thought, “might have come with me.  He would have understood and loved it!” But the thought was really this—­a moment’s reflection spread it, rather:  “He belongs somewhere to the Desert; the Desert brought him out here.”  And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a movement running below water—­“What does he want with it?  What is the deeper motive he conceals?  For there is a deeper motive; and it is concealed.”

But it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really, even while this thought flashed and went its way.  The empty chair was occupied at last.  Unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked straight at him.  Their eyes met fully.  For several seconds there was steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without being rude, passed searchingly all over his face.  It was disconcerting.  Crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn away, determined not to be the first to shift his gaze.  And when at length she lowered her eyes he felt that many things had happened, as in a long period of intimate conversation.  Her mind had judged him through and through.  Questions and answer flashed.  They were no longer strangers.  For the rest of dinner, though he was careful to avoid direct inspection, he was aware that she felt his presence and was secretly speaking with him.  She asked questions beneath her breath.  The answers rose with the quickened pulses in his blood.  Moreover, she explained Richard Vance.  It was this woman’s power that shone reflected in the man.  She was the one who knew the big, unusual things.  Vance merely echoed the rush of her vital personality.