lowly,
while he and they watched horsemen coming out from Assouan towards them.

David urged his camel on. Presently he could distinguish the features
of the woman riding towards him. It was Hylda. His presentiment, his
instinct had been right. His heart beat tumultuously, his hand trembled,
he grew suddenly weak; but he summoned up his will, and ruled himself to
something like composure. This, then, was his home-coming from the
far miseries and trials and battle-fields--to see her face before all
others, to hear her voice first. What miracle had brought this thing to
pass, this beautiful, bitter, forbidden thing? Forbidden! Whatever the
cause of her coming, she must not see what he felt for her. He must deal
fairly by her and by Eglington; he must be true to that real self which
had emerged from the fiery trial in the monastery. Bronzed as he was,
his face showed no paleness; but, as he drew near her, it grew pinched
and wan from the effort at self-control. He set his lips and rode on,
until he could see her eyes looking into his--eyes full of that which he
had never seen in any eyes in all the world.

What had been her feelings during that ride in the desert? She had not
meant to go out to meet him. After she heard that he was coming, her
desire was to get away from all the rest of the world, and be alone with
her thoughts. He was coming, he was safe, and her work was done. What
she had set out to do was accomplished--to bring him back, if it was
God's will, out of the jaws of death, for England's sake, for the
world's sake, for his sake, for her own sake. For her own sake? Yes,
yes, in spite of all, for her own sake. Whatever lay before, now, for
this one hour, for this moment of meeting he should be hers. But meet
him, where? Before all the world, with a smile of conventional welcome
on her lips, with the same hand-clasp that any friend and lover of
humanity would give him?

The desert air blew on her face, keen, sweet, vibrant, thrilling. What
he had heard that night at the monastery, the humming life of the land
of white fire--the desert, the million looms of all the weavers of the
world weaving, this she heard in the sunlight, with the sand rising
like surf behind her horse's heels. The misery and the tyranny and the
unrequited love were all behind her, the disillusion and the loss and
the undeserved insult to her womanhood--all, all were sunk away into the
unredeemable past. Here, in Egypt, where she had first