“Does it matter the camel-men knowing?  Are they to know?  Am I to ride or walk?”

“You leave everythin’ to Ibrahim.  You go in your tent, and presently I come.”

She went at once into the tent, and sat down on a folding chair.  A little round iron table stood before it.  She leaned her arms on the table and laid her face against the back of her hand.  Her cheek was burning.  She sprang up, went to her dressing-case, unlocked it, drew out the boite de beaute which Baroudi had given her in the orange-garden, and quickly made her face up, standing before the glass that was pinned to the canvas.  Then she put on a short fur coat.  The wind would be cold in the sands.  She wondered how far they had to go.

And if Nigel should unexpectedly return, as nearly all husbands did on such occasions?

She could not bother about that.  She felt too desperate to care; she felt in the grasp of fate.  If the fate was to be untoward, so much the worse for her—­and for Nigel.  She meant to go beyond that ridge of the sand.  That was all she knew.  Quickly she buttoned the fur coat and put on a hat and gloves.

“Now we goin’ to start.”

Ibrahim put his muffled head in at the door of the tent.

“Walking?” she asked.

“We goin’ to start walkin’.”

When she came out, she found that the brushwood fire had been pulled to pieces.

“Down there they not see nothin’,” said Ibrahim, pointing towards the darkness before them.

“And the men?  Does it matter about the men?” she asked perfunctorily.  She did not feel that she really cared.

“All the men sleepin’, except Hamza.  Him watchin’.”

The tents of the men were at some distance.  She looked, and saw no movement, no figures except the faint and grotesque silhouettes of the hobbled camels.

“I say that I follow my Lord Arminigel.”

They started into the desert.  As they left the camp, Mrs. Armine saw Hamza behind her tent, patrolling with a matchlock over his shoulder.

The night was dark and starless; the breeze, though slight and wavering over the sands, was penetrating and cold.  The feet of Mrs. Armine sank down at each step into the deep and yielding sands as she went on into the blackness of the immeasurable desert.  And as she gazed before her at the hollow blackness and felt the immensity of the unpeopled spaces, it seemed to her that Ibrahim was leading her into some crazy adventure, that they were going only towards the winds, the desolate sands, and the darkness that might be felt.  He did not speak to her, nor she to him, till she heard, apparently near them the angry snarl of a camel.  Then she stopped.

“Did you hear that?  There’s some one near us,” she said.

“My lady come on!  That is a very good dromedary for us.”

“Ah!” she said.

She hastened forward again.  In two or three seconds the camel snarled furiously again.