ld see her face, with eyes unnaturally dilated, and
lips quivering. Then moved again beyond control, he drew her so close
that he could feel the throbbing of her heart, and put his lips to her
forehead all wet with heat. She closed her eyes, gave a little choke,
and buried her face against his coat.

"There, there, my darling!" he kept on saying. "There, there, my
darling!" He could feel the snuggling of her cheek against his shoulder.
He had got her--had got her! He was somehow certain that she would not
draw back now. And in the wonder and ecstasy of that thought, all the
world above her head, the stars in their courses, the wood which had
frightened her, seemed miracles of beauty and fitness. By such fortune
as had never come to man, he had got her! And he murmured over and over
again:

"I love you!" She was resting perfectly quiet against him, while her
heart ceased gradually to beat so fast. He could feel her cheek rubbing
against his coat of Harris tweed. Suddenly she sniffed at it, and
whispered:

"It smells good."

VI

When summer sun has burned all Egypt, the white man looks eagerly each
day for evening, whose rose-coloured veil melts opalescent into the dun
drift, of the hills, and iridescent above, into the slowly deepening
blue. Pierson stood gazing at the mystery of the desert from under the
little group of palms and bougainvillea which formed the garden of the
hospital. Even-song was in full voice: From the far wing a gramophone
was grinding out a music-hall ditty; two aeroplanes, wheeling exactly
like the buzzards of the desert, were letting drip the faint whir of
their flight; metallic voices drifted from the Arab village; the wheels
of the water-wells creaked; and every now and then a dry rustle was
stirred from the palm-leaves by puffs of desert wind. On either hand
an old road ran out, whose line could be marked by the little old
watch-towers of another age. For how many hundred years had human
life passed along it to East and West; the brown men and their camels,
threading that immemorial track over the desert, which ever filled him
with wonder, so still it was, so wide, so desolate, and every evening so
beautiful! He sometimes felt that he could sit for ever looking at it;
as though its cruel mysterious loveliness were--home; and yet he never
looked at it without a spasm of homesickness.

So far his new work had brought him no nearer to the hearts of men. Or
at least he did not feel it