ed, and the cry was the cry of a man whose throat is
parched, and whose limbs fail beneath him. "Abou Fatma! Abou Fatma!" He
stumbled as he ran, picked himself up, ran and stumbled again; and about
him the deep soft sand piled itself into pyramids, built itself into
long slopes and ridges, and levelled itself flat with an extraordinary
and a malicious rapidity. "Abou Fatma!" cried Feversham, and he began to
argue in a weak obstinate voice. "I know the wells are here--close
by--within half a mile. I know they are--I know they are."

The clue to that speech Trench had not got. He knew nothing of
Feversham's adventure at Berber; he could not tell that the wells were
the Wells of Obak, or that Feversham, tired with the hurry of his
travelling, and after a long day's march without water, had lost his way
among the shifting sandhills. But he did know that Willoughby had taken
back his feather, and he made a guess as to the motive which had brought
Feversham now to the House of Stone. Even on that point, however, he was
not to remain in doubt; for in a while he heard his own name upon
Feversham's lips.

Remorse seized upon Colonel Trench. The sending of the feathers had been
his invention and his alone. He could not thrust the responsibility of
his invention upon either Willoughby or Castleton; it was just his
doing. He had thought it rather a shrewd and clever stroke, he
remembered at the time--a vengeance eminently just. Eminently just, no
doubt, it was, but he had not thought of the woman. He had not imagined
that she might be present when the feathers came. He had indeed almost
forgotten the episode, he had never speculated upon the consequences,
and now they rose up and smote the smiter.

And his remorse was to grow. For the night was not nearly at its end.
All through the dark slow hours he supported Feversham and heard him
talk. Now Feversham was lurking in the bazaar at Suakin and during the
siege.

"During the siege," thought Trench. "While we were there, then, he was
herding with the camel-drivers in the bazaar learning their tongues,
watching for his chance. Three years of it!"

At another moment Feversham was slinking up the Nile to Wadi Halfa with
a zither, in the company of some itinerant musicians, hiding from any
who might remember him and accuse him with his name. Trench heard of a
man slipping out from Wadi Halfa, crossing the Nile and wandering with
the assumed manner of a lunatic southwards, starving a