hose pale pink leaves.

CHAPTER XVI

"_My faint spirit was sitting in the light
Of thy looks, my love;
It panted for thee like the hind at noon
For the brooks, my love_."

SHELLEY.

For some inexplicable reason, the little old lady's trust in Jill's son
was unshakable. Why, she could not have well explained. It might have
been because of his ability to hide his hurt or the memory of his words
spoken as the fortune-teller on the night of the ball, or perhaps
through his self-denial in refraining from using his mother's erstwhile
friendship with the old aristocrat, as a key to the door which was
locked fast between himself and the girl he loved.

After all, such marriages _had_ taken place, thousands of them, so why
should not his with the beautiful girl be added to the list, the
outcome thereof proving the proverbial exception to the inevitable
disastrous ending of all such unions?

Why did he deny himself?

Just because he loved the girl with the same all-sacrificing love his
white mother had given his Arabian father.

If it had been otherwise, with never a second thought he would have
lifted the girl, as doubtlessly his ancestors had oft-times lifted
women in their _gazus_ or raids, and left the consequences in the hands
of that old beldame Fate.

So it had been decided to start the day after the morrow by private and
swiftest steam-boat to Luxor, where Damaris, shepherded by Jane Coop
and under the social wing of Lady Thistleton, would sojourn at the
Winter Palace Hotel until such time as her godmother should see fit to
return from her errand of mercy to the House 'an Mahabbha in the Oasis
of Khargegh.

Thus, whilst Jane Coop slept placidly and Maria Hobson wrestled under
the bed-covering in the last throes of a nightmare in which, as a
camel, she packed parcels of sand wrapped in tissue-paper, in trunks
which stretched across an endless desert, Damaris drove out to the
Obelisk for her last ride on the stallion Sooltan.

She rode out into the shadows, the dawn having barely lifted the hem of
night's purple raiment from the edge of the world; out into the desert
stretching silver-grey, soundless, half-waking; just stirred by the
light touch of the breeze, which, heralding the dawn, sends little
spirals of sand dancing away to the east and away to the west and blows
out the stars one by one.

And she rode listlessly, knowing that no desert would ever be as this
desert, or da