Thus it had to be arranged secretly that he would ride from his bungalow as Captain Barlow and leave the city as Ayub Alli, an Afghan.

Perhaps Barlow was over tired, that curious knotted condition of the nerves through overstrain that rasps a man’s mental fibre beyond the narcotic of sleep, and yet holds him in a hectic state of half unconsciousness.  He counted camels—­long strings of soured, complaining beasts, short-legged, stout, shaggy desert-ships, such as merchants of Kabul used to carry their dried fruits,—­figs and dates and pomegranates, and the wondrous flavoured Sirdar melon,—­wending across the Sind Desert of floating white sand to Rajasthan.

Once a male, tickled to frenzy by the caress of a female’s velvet lips upon his rump, with a hoarse bubbling scream, wheeled suddenly, snapping the thin lead-cord that reached from the tail of the camel in front to the button in his nostril, and charged the lady in an exuberance of affection with a full broadside—­thrust from his chest that bowled her over, where she lay among the fragments of two huge broken burnt-clay gumlas, that, filled with water, had been lashed to her sides.

Barlow sat up at this startling tumult that was the outcome of his slipping a little into slumber.  He threw his head back on the pillow with a smothered, “Damn!”

His bed had creaked, and an answering echo as if something had slipped or slid, perhaps the sole of a bare foot on the fibrous floor matting, at the window, fell upon his senses.  Turning his face toward the sound he waited, eyes trying to pierce the gloom, and ear attuned.  He almost cried out in alarm as something floated through the dark from the window and fell with a soft thud upon his face.  He brushed at the something—­perhaps a bat, or a lizard, or a snake—­with his hand and received a sharp prick, a little dart of pain in a thumb.  He sprang from the bed, lighted the wick that floated in the iron lamp, and discovered that the thing of dread was a rose, its petals red against the white sheet.

He knew who must have thrown the rose, and almost wished that it had been a chance missil, even a snake, but he put the lamp down, passed into the bathroom, and unbarring the wooden door, called softly, “Who is there?”

From the cover of an oleander a slight girlish form rose up and came to the door saying, “It is Bootea, Sahib; do not be angry,—­there is something to be said.”

By the arm he led her within and bidding her wait, passed to the bedroom and drew the heavy curtains of the windows.  Then he went through the drawing-room and out to the verandah, where the watchman lay asleep on his roped charpoy.  Barlow woke him:  “There’s a thief prowling about the bungalow.  Do not sleep till I give you permission.  See that no one enters,” he commanded.

He went back to his room, closed and barred the door, and told Bootea to come.

When the girl entered he said:  “You should not have come here; there are eyes, and ears, and evil tongues.”