the fortress gates, a lance with a lantern muffled in Arab fashion, so that the light was unseen from before, while it streamed over herself, to enable her to guide her way if the moon should be veiled by clouds.  With that single, starry gleam aslant on a level with her eyes, she rode through the ghastly twilight of the half-lit plains; now flooded with luster as the moon emerged, now engulfed in darkness as the stormy western winds drove the cirrhi over it.  But neither darkness nor light differed to her; she noted neither; she was like one drunk with strong wine, and she had but one dread—­that the power of her horse would give way under the unnatural strain made on it, and that she would reach too late, when the life she went to save would have fallen forever, silent unto death, as she had seen the life of Marquise fall.

Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the animal quiver under the spur, and she heard the catch in his panting breath as he strained to give his fleetest and best, that told her how, ere long, the racing speed, the extended gallop at which she kept him, would tell, and beat him down, despite his desert strain.  She had no pity; she would have killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal.  She was giving her own life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this thing, to save even the man condemned to die with the rising of the sun.  She did not spare herself; and she would have spared no living thing, to fulfill the mission that she undertook.  She loved with the passionate blindness of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern blood.  If to spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, she would have given the word for their destruction without a moment’s pause.

Once, from some screen of gaunt and barren rock, a shot was fired at her, and flew within a hair’s breadth of her brain; she never even looked around to see whence it had come; she knew it was from some Arab prowler of the plains.  Her single spark of light through the half-veiled lantern passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau.  And as she felt the hours steal on—­so fast, so hideously fast—­with that horrible relentlessness which tarries for no despair, as it hastens for no desire, her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her brain.

What she dreaded came.

Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight was passed, the animal strained with hard-drawn, panting gasps to answer the demand made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded onward.  In the lantern light she saw his head stretched out in the racing agony, his distended eyeballs, his neck covered with foam and blood, his heaving flanks that seemed bursting with every throb that his heart gave; she knew that, half a league more forced from him, he would drop like a dead thing never to rise again.  She let the bridle drop upon the