e as
a million to one that she would reach him with it in time, ere with the
rising of the sun his life would have set forever.

All the horror of remorse was on her; to her nature the bitter jealousy
in which she had desired vengeance on him seemed to have rendered her a
murderess. She loved him--loved him with an exceeding passion; and only
in this extremity, when it was confronted with the imminence of death,
did the fullness and the greatness of that love make their way out of
the petulant pride and the wounded vanity which had obscured them. She
had been ere now a child and a hero; beneath this blow which struck at
him she changed--she became a woman and a martyr.

And she rode at full speed through the night, as she had done through
the daylight, her eyes glancing all around in the keen instinct of a
trooper, her hand always on the butt of her belt pistol. For she knew
well what the danger was of these lonely, unguarded, untraveled leagues
that yawned in so vast a distance between her and her goal. The Arabs,
beaten, but only rendered furious by defeat, swept down on to those
plains with the old guerrilla skill, the old marvelous rapidity. She
knew that with every second shot or steel might send her reeling from
her saddle; that with every moment she might be surrounded by some
desperate band who would spare neither her sex nor her youth. But that
intoxication of peril, the wine-draught she had drunk from her infancy,
was all which sustained her in that race with death. It filled her veins
with their old heat, her heart with its old daring, her nerves with
their old matchless courage; but for it she would have dropped,
heart-sick with terror and despair, ere her errand could be done; under
it she had the coolness, the keenness, the sagacity, the sustained
force, and the supernatural strength of some young hunted animal. They
might slay her, so that she left perforce her mission unaccomplished;
but no dread of such a fate had even an instant's power to appall her or
arrest her. While there should be breath in her, she would go on to the
end.

There were eight hours' hard riding before her, at the swiftest pace
her horse could make; and she was already worn by the leagues already
traversed. Although this was nothing new that she did now, yet as time
flew on and she flew with it, ceaselessly, through the dim, solitary,
barren moonlit land, her brain now and then grew giddy, her heart now
and then stood still with