And while she wept to herself in solitude, and her brother Denzil wandered about in the gardens of the hotel, encouraging within himself hopes of winning the bewitching Ziska for a wife, Armand Gervase, shut up in his room under plea of slight indisposition, reviewed the emotions of the past night and tired to analyze them.  Some men are born self-analysts, and are able to dissect their feelings by some peculiar form of mental surgery which finally leads them to cut out tenderness as though it were a cancer, love as a disease, and romantic aspirations as mere uncomfortable growths injurious to self-interest, but Gervase was not one of these.  Outwardly he assumed more or less the composed and careless demeanor of the modern French cynic, but inwardly the man was a raging fire of fierce passions which were sometimes too strong to be held in check.  At the present moment he was prepared to sacrifice everything, even life itself, to obtain possession of the woman he coveted, and he made no attempt whatever to resist the tempest of desire that was urging him on with an invincible force in a direction which, for some strange and altogether inexplicable reason, he dreaded.  Yes, there was a dim sense of terror lurking behind all the wild passion that filled his soul—­a haunting, vague idea that this sudden love, with its glowing ardor and intoxicating delirium, was like the brilliant red sunset which frequently prognosticates a night of storm, ruin and death.  Yet, though he felt this presentiment like a creeping shudder of cold through his blood, it did not hold him back, or for a moment impress him with the idea that it might be better to yield no further to this desperate love-madness which enthralled him.

Once only, he thought, “What if I left Egypt now—­at once—­and saw her no more?” And then he laughed scornfully at the impossibility proposed.  “Leave Egypt!” he muttered, “I might as well leave the world altogether!  She would draw me back with those sweet wild eyes of hers,—­she would drag me from the uttermost parts of the earth to fall at her feet in a very agony of love.  My God!  She must have her way and do with me as she will, for I feel that she holds my life in her hands!”

As he spoke these last words half aloud, he sprang up from the chair in which he had been reclining, and stood for a moment lost in frowning meditation.

“My life in her hands!” he repeated musingly.  “Yes, it has come to that!  My life!” A great sigh broke from him.  “My life—­my art—­my work—­my name!  In all these things I have taken pride, and she—­ she can trample them under her feet and make of me nothing more than man clamoring for woman’s love!  What a wild world it is!  What a strange Force must that be which created it!—­the Force that some men call God and others Devil!  A strange, blind, brute Force!—­for it makes us aspire only to fall; it gives a man dreams of ambition and splendid attainment only to fling him like a mad fool on a woman’s breast, and bid him find there, and there only, the bewildering sweetness which makes everything else in existence poor and tame in comparison.  Well, well—­my life!  What is it?  A mere grain of sand dropped in the sea; let her do with it as she will.  God!  How I felt her power upon me last night,—­last night when her lithe figure swaying in the dance reminded me ...”