ng. The chase was short, however,
for they were desert folk, and they returned to loot the camp which had
menaced them so long.

Only the new-comers, Nahoum's men, carried the hunt far; and they
brought back with them a body which their leader commanded to be brought
to a great room of the palace. Towards sunset David and Ebn Ezra Bey and
Lacey came together to this room. The folds of loose linen were lifted
from the face, and all three looked at it long in silence. At last Lacey
spoke:

"He got what he wanted; the luck was with him. It's better than
Leperland."

"In the bosom of Allah there is peace," said Ebn Ezra. "It is well with
Achmet."

With misty eyes David stooped and took the dead man's hand in his for a
moment. Then he rose to his feet and turned away.

"And Nahoum also--and Nahoum," he said presently. "Read this," he added,
and put a letter from Nahoum into Ebn Ezra's hand.

Lacey reverently covered Achmet's face. "Say, he got what he wanted," he
said again.

CHAPTER XLII. THE LOOM OF DESTINY

It was many a day since the Duchess of Snowdon had seen a sunrise, and
the one on which she now gazed from the deck of the dahabieh Nefert,
filled her with a strange new sense of discovery and revelation.
Her perceptions were arrested and a little confused, and yet the
undercurrent of feeling was one of delight and rejuvenation. Why did
this sunrise bring back, all at once, the day when her one lost child
was born, and she looked out of the windows of Snowdon Hall, as she lay
still and nerveless, and thought how wonderful and sweet and green was
the world she saw and the sky that walled it round? Sunrise over the
Greek Temple of Philae and the splendid ruins of a farther time towering
beside it! In her sight were the wide, islanded Nile, where Cleopatra
loitered with Antony, the foaming, crashing cataracts above, the great
quarries from which ancient temples had been hewed, unfinished obelisks
and vast blocks of stone left where bygone workmen had forsaken them,
when the invader came and another dynasty disappeared into that partial
oblivion from which the Egyptian still emerges triumphant over all his
conquerors, unchanged in form and feature. Something of its meaning got
into her mind.

"I wonder what Windlehurst would think of it. He always had an eye for
things like that," she murmured; and then caught her breath, as she
added: "He always liked beauty." She looked at her wrinkled, childish
hands.