a sudden numbing faintness. She shook the
weakness off her with the resolute scorn for it of her nature, and
succeeded in its banishment. They had put in her hand, as she had passed
through the fortress gates, a lance with a lantern muffled in Arab
fashion, so that the light was unseen from before, while it streamed
over herself, to enable her to guide her way if the moon should be
veiled by clouds. With that single, starry gleam aslant on a level with
her eyes, she rode through the ghastly twilight of the half-lit plains;
now flooded with luster as the moon emerged, now engulfed in darkness as
the stormy western winds drove the cirrhi over it. But neither darkness
nor light differed to her; she noted neither; she was like one drunk
with strong wine, and she had but one dread--that the power of her horse
would give way under the unnatural strain made on it, and that she
would reach too late, when the life she went to save would have fallen
forever, silent unto death, as she had seen the life of Marquise fall.

Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the animal quiver
under the spur, and she heard the catch in his panting breath as he
strained to give his fleetest and best, that told her how, ere long, the
racing speed, the extended gallop at which she kept him, would tell,
and beat him down, despite his desert strain. She had no pity; she would
have killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was giving
her own life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this
thing, to save even the man condemned to die with the rising of the sun.
She did not spare herself; and she would have spared no living thing,
to fulfill the mission that she undertook. She loved with the passionate
blindness of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern
blood. If to spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, she would
have given the word for their destruction without a moment's pause.

Once, from some screen of gaunt and barren rock, a shot was fired at
her, and flew within a hair's breadth of her brain; she never even
looked around to see whence it had come; she knew it was from some Arab
prowler of the plains. Her single spark of light through the half-veiled
lantern passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau. And
as she felt the hours steal on--so fast, so hideously fast--with that
horrible relentlessness which tarries for no despair, as it hastens for
no desire, her lips grew dr