In the dawn the desert was the home of the breeze, of gentle sunbeams and of liberty.  Presently she heard the noise of horses cantering near at hand, and Count Anteoni, followed by two Arab attendants, came round the bend of the wall and drew up beneath her.  He rode on a high red Arab saddle, and a richly-ornamented gun was slung in an embroidered case behind him on the right-hand side.  A broad and soft brown hat kept the sun from his forehead.  The two attendants rode on a few paces and waited in the shadow of the wall.

“Don’t you wish you were going out?” he said.  “Out into that?” And he pointed with his whip towards the dreamlike blue of the far horizon.  She leaned over, looking down at him and at his horse, which fidgeted and arched his white neck and dropped foam from his black flexible lips.

“No,” she answered after a moment of thought.  “I must speak the truth, you know.”

“To me, always.”

“I feel that you were right, that my summons has not yet come to me.”

“And when it comes?”

“I shall obey it without fear, even if I go in the storm and the darkness.”

He glanced at the radiant sky, at the golden beams slanting down upon the palms.

“The Coran says:  ‘The fate of every man have We bound about his neck.’  May yours be as serene, as beautiful, as a string of pearls.”

“But I have never cared to wear pearls,” she answered.

“No?  What are your stones?”

“Rubies.”

“Blood!  No others?”

“Sapphires.”

“The sky at night.”

“And opals.”

“Fires gleaming across the white of moonlit dunes.  Do you remember?”

“I remember.”

“And you do not ask me for the end of the Diviner’s vision even now?”

“No.”

She hesitated for an instant.  Then she added: 

“I will tell you why.  It seemed to me that there was another’s fate in it as well as my own, and that to hear would be to intrude, perhaps, upon another’s secrets.”

“That was your reason?”

“My only reason.”  And then she added, repeating consciously Androvsky’s words:  “I think there are things that should be let alone.”

“Perhaps you are right.”

A stronger breath of the cool wind came over the flats, and all the palm trees rustled.  Through the garden there was a delicate stir of life.

“My children are murmuring farewell,” said the Count.  “I hear them.  It is time!  Good-bye, Miss Enfilden—­my friend, if I may call you so.  May Allah have you in his keeping, and when your summons comes, obey it—­alone.”

As he said the last word his grating voice dropped to a deep note of earnest, almost solemn, gravity.  Then he lifted his hat, touched his horse with his heel, and galloped away into the sun.