tay here. Better be smitten here, where thou canst get
help from thine own country, if need be, than yonder, where they but
wait to spoil thy work and kill thee. Thou art young; wilt thou throw
thy life away? Art thou not needed here as there? For me it is nothing,
whether it be now or in a few benumbing years; but for thee--is there no
one whom thou lovest so well that thou wouldst not shelter thy life to
spare that life sorrow? Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will
love thee to mortal sorrow, if thou goest without care to thy end too
soon?"

As a warm wind suddenly sweeps across the cool air of a summer evening
for an instant, suffocating and unnerving, so Ebn Ezra's last words
swept across David's spirit. His breath came quicker, his eyes half
closed. "Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will love thee to
mortal sorrow, if--"

As a hand secretly and swiftly slips the lever that opens the
sluice-gates of a dike, while the watchman turns away for a moment to
look at the fields which the waters enrich and the homes of poor folk
whom the gates defend, so, in a moment, when off his guard, worn with
watching and fending, as it were, Ebn Ezra had sprung the lever, and
a flood of feeling swept over David, drowned him in its impulse and
pent-up force.

"Is there none that thou lovest so--" Of what use had been all his
struggle and his pain since that last day in Hamley--his dark fighting
days in the desert with Lacey and Mahommed, and his handful of faithful
followers, hemmed in by dangers, the sands swarming with Arabs who
feathered now to his safety, now to his doom, and his heart had hungered
for what he had denied it with a will that would not be conquered?
Wasted by toil and fever and the tension of danger and the care of
others dependent on him, he had also fought a foe which was ever at
his elbow, ever whispered its comfort and seduction in his ear, the
insidious and peace-giving, exalting opiate that had tided him over some
black places, and then had sought for mastery of him when he was back
again in the world of normal business and duty, where it appealed not as
a medicine, but as a perilous luxury. And fighting this foe, which had
a voice so soothing, and words like the sound of murmuring waters, and
a cool and comforting hand that sought to lead him into gardens of
stillness and passive being, where he could no more hear the clangour
and vexing noises of a world that angered and agonised, the