le sigh and saw a small hand
covering a yawn. The girl's slender shoulders were wilting with
incalculable fatigue.

Instantly he commanded sleep, and obediently she curled down into
the little nest he prepared, pillowing her head upon his coat, and
almost instantly he heard her rhythmic breathing, slow and unhurried
as a little child. His heart swelled with a feeling for which he had
no name, as he sat there, his back against a camel, staring out into
the night, an unknown feeling in which joy was very deep and triumph
was merged into a holy thankfulness.

CHAPTER XVIII

DESERT MAGIC

He had meant but forty winks, but it had been dark when his eyes
closed and he opened them to the unreal half-lights of early dawn.
The sky was pearl; the sands were fawn-colored; the crest of a low
hill to the east shone as if it were living gold, and the next
instant it seemed as if a fire were kindled upon it. It was the sun
surging up into the heavens, and great waves of color, like a sea of
flame, mounted higher and higher with it.

Impulsively Billy bent over the little figure sleeping so soundly at
his side, speaking her name gently. And Arlee, waking with a start
and a catch of her breath that went to his heart, opened her eyes on
a wild splendor of morning that seemed the outer aspect of the
radiant joy within her.

They looked and looked while the east flamed like a burning Rome,
and then the glow softened and paled and dissolved in mysteries and
miracles of color, in tender rose and exquisite shell pinks, in
amethysts and violets and limpid, delicate, fair greens. All about
them the sands were turning to gold, and the rim of the distant
horizon grew clearer and clearer against the brightening blue of the
sky, like a great circling tawny sea lapping on every side the arch
of the heavens.

As they looked their hearts stirred and quickened with that
incommunicable thrill of the desert, and their eyes turned and
sought each other in silence. The gold of the sun was on Arlee's
hanging hair and the morning-blue of the sky in her eyes; her face
was flushed from sleep and a tiny tendril still clung to the pink
cheek on which she had been sleeping. Somehow that inconsequent
small tendril roused in Billy a thrill of absurd tenderness and
delight.... She was so very small and childish, sitting there in the
Libyan desert with him, looking up at him with such adorable
simplicity.... In her eyes he seemed to see something o