The longer he stood, the more insistent did this
question grow. The low mud walls grew strangely sinister; the welcome
green of the waving palms, after so many arid days of sun and sand and
stones, became an ironical invitation to death. He began to wonder
whether he had not already done enough for honour in venturing so near.

The sun beat upon him; his strength ebbed from him as though his veins
were opened. If he were caught, he thought, as surely he would be--oh,
very surely! He saw the fanatical faces crowding fiercely about him ...
were not mutilations practised?... He looked about him, shivering even
in that strong heat, and the great loneliness of the place smote upon
him, so that his knees shook. He faced about and commenced to run,
leaping in a panic alone and unpursued across the naked desert under the
sun, while from his throat feeble cries broke inarticulately.

He ran, however, only for a few yards, and it was the very violence of
his flight which stopped him. These four years of anticipation were as
nothing, then? He had schooled himself in the tongue, he had lived in
the bazaars, to no end? He was still the craven who had sent in his
papers? The quiet confidence with which he had revealed his plan to
Lieutenant Sutch over the table in the Criterion grill-room was the mere
vainglory of a man who continually deceived himself? And Ethne?...

He dropped upon the ground and, drawing his coat over his head, lay, a
brown spot indistinguishable from the sand about him, an irregularity in
the great waste surface of earth. He shut the prospect from his eyes,
and over the thousands of miles of continent and sea he drew Ethne's
face towards him. A little while and he was back again in Donegal. The
summer night whispered through the open doorway in the hall; in a room
near by people danced to music. He saw the three feathers fluttering to
the floor; he read the growing trouble in Ethne's face. If he could do
this thing, and the still harder thing which now he knew to lie beyond,
he might perhaps some day see that face cleared of its trouble. There
were significant words too in his ears, "I should have no doubt that you
and I would see much of one another afterwards." Towards the setting of
the sun he rose from the ground, and walking down towards Berber, passed
between the gates.

CHAPTER XI

DURRANCE HEARS NEWS OF FEVERSHAM

A month later Durrance arrived in London and discovered a letter from
Ethne aw