“The Bedouin he make him do that to tell us where he is,” said Ibrahim.

He cried out some words in Arabic.  A violent guttural voice replied out of the darkness.  In a moment, under the lee of a sand dune, they came upon two muffled figures holding two camels, which were lying down.  Upon one there was a sort of palanquin, in which Mrs. Armine took her seat, with a Bedouin sitting in front.  A stick was plied.  The beast protested, filling the hollow of the night with a complaint that at last became almost leonine; then suddenly rose up, was silent, and started off at a striding trot.

Mrs. Armine could not measure either the time that elapsed or the space that was covered during that journey.  She was filled with a sense of excitement and adventure that she had never experienced before, and that made her feel oddly young.  The dark desert, swept by the chilling breeze, became to her suddenly a place of strong hopes and of desires leaping towards fulfilment.  She was warmed through and through by expectation, as she had not been warmed by the great camp fire that had been kindled to greet Nigel.  And when at last in the distance there shone out a light, like an earth-bound star, to her all the desert seemed glowing with an almost exultant radiance.

But the light was surely far away, for though the dromedary swung on over the desert, it did not seem to her to grow clearer or brighter, but like a distant eye it regarded her with an almost cruel steadiness, as if it calmly read her soul.

And she thought of Baroudi’s eyes, and looking again at the yellow light, she felt as if he were watching her calmly from some fastness of the sands to which she could not draw near.

In the desert it is difficult to measure distances.  Just as Mrs. Armine was thinking that she could never gain that light, it broadened, broke up into forms, the forms of leaping flames blown this way and that by the stealthy wind of the waste, became abruptly a fire revealing vague silhouettes of camels, of crouching men, of tents, of guard dogs, of hobbled horses.  She was in the midst of a camp pitched far out in a lonely place of the sands within sight of no oasis.

The dromedary knelt.  She was on her feet with Ibrahim standing beside her.

For a moment she felt dazed.  She stood still, consciously pressing her feet down against the sand which glowed in the light from the flames.  She saw eyes—­the marvellous, birdlike eyes of Bedouins—­steadily regarding her beneath the darkness of peaked hoods.  She heard the crackle of flames in the windy silence, a soft grating sound that came from the jaws of feeding camels.  Dogs snuffed about her ankles.

“My lady, you comin’ with me!”