.
Her brother, for instance, the shepherd--"

"Her brother," Owen thought. "Ah!" They stopped to watch the
shepherd, a boy of sixteen. "About two years older than his sister,"
Owen remarked, and Beclere acquiesced. The boy had begun to play his
flute again. He played at first listlessly, then with all his soul,
and then with extraordinary passion. Owen watched the balance of his
body and arms, and the movement, extraordinarily voluptuous, of his
neck and head. He played on, his breath coming at times so feebly
that there was hardly any sound at all, at other times awaking music
loud and imperative; and the two men stood listening, for how many
minutes they did not know, but for what seemed to them a long while.
Their reverie stopped when the music ceased. It was then that a
dun-coloured dove with a lilac neck flew through the garden and took
refuge in a palm, seen for a moment as she alighted on the flexible
djerrid on a background of blue air. She disappeared into the heart
of the tree; the leaves were again stirred. She cooed once or twice,
and then there was a hush and a stillness in every leaf.

"You would like to see my property?"

Owen said he would like to see all the oasis, or as much as they
could see of it in one day without fatiguing themselves.

"You can see it all in a day, for it is but a small island, about a
thousand Arabs in the villages."

"So many as that?"

"Well, there has to be, in order to save ourselves from the predatory
bands which still exist, for, as I daresay you have already learned,
the Arabs are divided into two classes--the agricultural and the
nomadic. We have to be in sufficient numbers to save ourselves from
the nomads, otherwise we should be pillaged and harried from year's
end to year's end--all our crops and camels taken."

"Border warfare--the same as existed in England in the Middle Ages."

Beclere agreed that the unsettled vagrant civilisation which existed
in the North of Africa up to 1830--which in 1860 was beginning to
pass away, and the traces of which still survived in the nineties--
resembled very much the border forays for which Northumberland is
still famous; and, walking through the palm-groves towards the Arab
village, they talked of the Arab race, listening all the while to
the singing of doves and of streams, Owen listless and happy.

"But I shall remember her again presently, and the stab will be as
bitter as ever!"

Beclere did not believe that the Ara