“His strength must be enormous,” Domini thought with a startled admiration.

She pulled up too on the bank above him and gave a halloo.  He turned his head, saw her, and put his horse at the bank, which was steep here and without any gap.  “You can’t do it,” she called.

In reply he dug the heels of his heavy boots into the horse’s flanks and came on recklessly.  She thought the horse would either refuse or try to get up and roll back on its rider.  It sprang at the bank and mounted like a wild cat.  There was a noise of falling stones, a shower of scattered earth-clods dropping downward, and he was beside her, white with dust, streaming with sweat, panting as if the labouring breath would rip his chest open, with the horse’s foam on his forehead, and a savage and yet exultant gleam in his eyes.

They looked at each other in silence, while their horses, standing quietly, lowered their narrow, graceful heads and touched noses with delicate inquiry.  Then she said: 

“I almost thought——­”

She stopped.

“Yes?” he said, on a great gasping breath that was like a sob.

“—­that you were off to the centre of the earth, or—­I don’t know what I thought.  You aren’t hurt?”

“No.”

He could only speak in monosyllables as yet.  She looked his horse over.

“He won’t give much more trouble just now.  Shall we ride back?”

As she spoke she threw a longing glance at the far desert, at the verge of which was a dull green line betokening the distant palms of an oasis.

Androvsky shook his head.

“But you——­” She hesitated.  “Perhaps you aren’t accustomed to horses, and with that saddle——­”

He shook his head again, drew a tremendous breath and said

“I don’t care, I’ll go on, I won’t go back.”

He put up one hand, brushed the foam from his streaming forehead, and said again fiercely: 

“I won’t go back.”

His face was extraordinary with its dogged, passionate expression showing through the dust and the sweat; like the face of a man in a fight to the death, she thought, a fight with fists.  She was glad at his last words and liked the iron sound in his voice.

“Come on then.”

And they began to ride towards the dull green line of the oasis, slowly on the sandy waste among the little round humps where the dusty cluster of bushes grew.

“You weren’t hurt by the fall?” she said.  “It looked a bad one.”

“I don’t know whether I was.  I don’t care whether I was.”

He spoke almost roughly.

“You asked me to ride with you,” he added.  “I’ll ride with you.”