“Good-bye,” he said, releasing her.  “I shall be back directly after sundown.”

“Yes.  Don’t wait for the dark down there.  If you were lost in the dunes!”

She pointed to the distant sand hills rising and falling monotonously to the horizon.

“If you are not back in good time,” she said, “I shall stand by the tower and wave a brand from the fire.”

“Why by the tower?”

“The ground is highest by the tower.”

She watched him ride away on a mule, with two Arabs carrying guns.  They went towards the plains of saltpetre that looked like snow beside the sea that was only a mirage.  Then she turned back into the tent, took up a volume of Fromentin’s, and sat down in a folding-chair at the tent door.  She read a little, but it was difficult to read with the mirage beneath her.  Perpetually her eyes were attracted from the book to its mystery and plaintive sadness, that was like the sadness of something unearthly, of a spirit that did not move but that suffered.  She did not put away the book, but presently she laid it down on her knees, open, and sat gazing.  Androvsky had disappeared with the Arabs into some fold of the sands.  The sun-ray had vanished with him.  Without Androvsky and the sun—­she still connected them together, and knew she would for ever.

The melancholy of this desert scene was increased for her till it became oppressive and lay upon her like a heavy weight.  She was not a woman inclined to any morbid imaginings.  Indeed, all that was morbid roused in her an instinctive disgust.  But the sudden greyness of the weather, coming after weeks of ardent sunshine, and combined with the fantastic desolation of the landscape, which was half real and half unreal, turned her for the moment towards a dreariness of spirit that was rare in her.

She realised suddenly, as she looked and did not see Androvsky even as a black and moving speck upon the plain; what the desert would seem to her without him, even in sunshine, the awfulness of the desolation of it, the horror of its distances.  And realising this she also realised the uncertainty of the human life in connection with any other human life.  To be dependent on another is to double the sum of the terrors of uncertainty.  She had done that.

If the immeasurable sands took Androvsky and never gave him back to her!  What would she do?

She gazed at the mirage sea with its dim red islands, and at the sad white plains along its edge.

Winter—­she would be plunged in eternal winter.  And each human life hangs on a thread.  All deep love, all consuming passion, holds a great fear within the circle of a great glory.  To-day the fear within the circle of her glory seemed to grow.  But she suddenly realised that she ought to dominate it, to confine it—­as it were—­to its original and permanent proportions.

She got up, came out upon the edge of the hill, and walked along it slowly towards the tower.