From among the reeds the plovers were rising; over the barren rocks the dazzling lizards glided; afar off strayed the goats; that was the only sign of animal existence.  He had wandered a long way from the caravanserai, and he began to retrace his steps, for his horse was there, and although he had received license to take leisure in returning, he had no home but the camp, no friends but those wild-eyed, leopard-like throng around him like a pack of dogs, each eager for the first glance, the first word; these companions of his adversity and of his perils, whom he had learned to love, with all their vices and all their crimes, for sake of the rough, courageous love that they could give in answer.

He moved slowly back over the desolate tracks of land stretched between him and the Algerian halting-place.  He had no fear that he would find his brother there.  He knew too well the nature with which he had to deal to hope that old affection would so have outweighed present fear that his debtor would have stayed to meet him yet once more.  On the impulse of the ungovernable pain which the other’s presence had been, he had bidden him leave Africa at once; now he almost wished he had bid him stay.  There was a weary, unsatisfied longing for some touch of love or of gratitude from this usurper, whom he had raised in his place.  He would have been rewarded enough if one sign of gladness that he lived had broken through the egotism and the stricken fear of the man whom he remembered as a little golden-headed child, with the hand of their dying mother lying in benediction on the fair, silken curls.

He had asked no questions.  He had gone back to no recriminations.  He guessed all it needed him to know; and he recoiled from the recital of the existence whose happiness was purchased by his own misery, and whose dignity was built on sand.  His sacrifice had not been in vain.  Placed out of the reach of temptation, the plastic, feminine, unstable character had been without a stain in the sight of men.  But it was little better at the core; and he wondered, in his suffering, as he went onward through the beauty of the young day, whether it had been worth the bitter price he had paid to raise this bending reed from out the waters which would have broken and swamped it at the outset.  It grew fair, and free, and flower-crowned now, in the midst of a tranquil and sunlit lake; but was it of more value than a drifted weed bearing the snake-egg hidden at its root?

He had come so far out of the ordinary route across the plains that it was two hours or more before he saw the dark, gray square of the caravanserai walls, and to its left that single, leaning pine growing out of a cleft within the rock that overhung the spot where the keenest anguish of all his life had known had been encountered and endured—­the spot which yet, for sake of the one laid to rest there beneath the somber branches, would be forever dearer to him than any other place in the soil of Africa.