call to prayer. His cry seemed to tear its way through
Mrs. Clarke's inertia. Abruptly she was in full possession of her
faculties. That Eastern man up there, nearer to the blue than she was,
cried, "Come to prayer!" But she had already uttered her prayer, and
surely Rosamund Leith was the answer.

As she drove away towards the Golden Horn she passed the Bedouin
striding along in the sun.

She looked at him, but he took no notice of her; the indifference of the
desert was about him.

CHAPTER XIV

Mrs. Clarke was in her bedroom with the door open that evening when she
heard a bell sound in the flat. She had fixed eight for the dinner hour.
It was now only half-past six. Nevertheless she felt sure that it was
Dion who had just rung. She went swiftly across the room and shut the
bedroom door. Two or three minutes later Sonia came in.

"Mr. Leith has come already, Madame," she said, looking straight at her
mistress.

"I expected him early, Sonia. You can tell him I will come almost
directly."

"Yes, Madame."

"Sonia, wait a minute! How am I looking this evening?"

"How?" said Sonia, with rather heavy emphasis.

"Yes. I feel--feel as if I were looking unlike my usual self."

Sonia stared hard at Mrs. Clarke. Then she said:

"So you are, Madame."

"In what way?"

"You look almost excited and younger than usual."

"Younger!"

"Yes, as if you were expecting something, almost as a girl expects. I
never saw you just like this before."

Mrs. Clarke looked at herself in a mirror earnestly, and for a long
time.

"That's all, Sonia," she said, turning round. "You can tell Mr. Leith."

Sonia went out.

Mrs. Clarke followed her ten minutes later. When she came into the
little hall she saw lying on a table beside Dion's hat several letters.
She stopped by the table and looked down at them. They lay there in
a pile held together by an elastic band, and she could only see the
writing on the envelope which was at the top. It was addressed to Dion
and had been through the post. She wondered whether among those letters
there was one from Rosamund. Had she written to the husband whom she had
cast out to tell him of the great change which had led her to give up
the religious life, to come out to the land of the cypress?

Mrs. Clarke glanced round; then she bent down noiselessly, picked up
the packet, slipped off the elastic band and examined the letters one by
one. She had never chanced to see Rosamund's handw