foreboding, a premonition for which he could not account, displaced
the gladness from his heart; and as they rode on and ever onwards he
told himself that they were surely riding towards tragedy.

Possibly it was the Celtic strain in him which rendered him liable to
these strange and perverse forebodings of evil. On sundry other
occasions in his earlier youth he had fallen with appalling swiftness
from the heights of glad anticipation to the depths of a certain and
most unwelcome gloom; and now, quite suddenly, he found himself involved
in a black and rayless melancholy which seemed to fortell some
catastrophic happening at hand.

It was with more and more difficulty that he replied to Sir Richard's
hopeful prophecies; and so strong upon him was the premonition of
disaster that when he learned at last that they were within an hour or
two's ride of their destination he spurred on his still willing steed in
a sudden desire to know the worst which was to befall.

As he stared ahead of him, his eyes beginning to adjust themselves now
to the peculiar conditions of the desert atmosphere, he caught sight of
a speck upon the sand which, unlike the majority of desert objects, the
scanty tamarisk bushes, the low humpbacked hills which here and there
formed an apparently endless chain, appeared to move, to grow almost
imperceptibly larger as the distance between them diminished.

During their ride over the desert they had met no other human beings.
Once or twice they had seen, to right or left of their track, a
collection of mud huts, overshadowed by the plumy tufts of tall
date-palms, betokening the presence of a handful of _fellaheen_
scratching a livelihood from the unfriendly sand. Again they had twice
beheld in the far distance a caravan winding its leisurely way upon some
mysterious errand to an unknown destination; but these last had been too
far away for their component parts of horses, camels, merchandise, to be
distinguished; and after a brief glance towards the long snaky lines as
they wound their way through the sand, Sir Richard and Anstice had
wisely refused to strain their eyesight further.

But this solitary unit on the vast face of the desert was a different
matter; and Anstice gazed steadily ahead in an as yet fruitless attempt
to make out what this thing which appeared to move towards them might
be.

At first he said nothing, thinking that his eyes might quite conceivably
be playing him tricks, that this a