wall and the roses. It meant nothing to her,
enclosed in the happy warmth of her lover's arms; death had no
meaning for her yet, hardly seventeen years' journey distant from
birth, and full of all the sap and great leaping fires of life.
Death was something so far away, so impossible to realise. It was
but a word to her--a casket enclosing nothing. Yet the death of
Buldoula was the embryo event in the womb of time from which was to
develop the whole tragedy of her own life.

"Buldoula is dead," she said again, carelessly, her rose-tipped
fingers smoothing the black sweeping arch of the man's brows.
"Perhaps her son is dead also. Ahmed will be very grieved--she was
going to bear her second son."

"Little dove! I must take you away to the mountains soon," said the
Druze, clasping her tighter to him. "Soon," he muttered again,
stooping down to look under the rose-boughs to the white-faced
house, now, with all its screened windows, dark. His words seemed
irrelevant, yet they were not. He had a keen prescience that the
death of the favourite of the harem might influence very quickly
Dilama's fate.

"Why not take me now, Murad? I want to see the mountains," and she
laid her little head, crowned by its masses of brown-gold hair, on
his warm breast.

"The caravan does not start for two weeks more," he answered
thoughtfully. "We must wait for it. It would be madness to try to
escape alone. We should be seen, noted, and tracked down. Think how
Ahmed will look for his treasure when he finds it stolen! But if
you are hidden in a bale of goods on a camel in the caravan, who
will suspect, who will know that the Druze has taken you? The whole
caravan of Druzes cannot be stopped because Ahmed has lost a wife!
No, in the caravan, with all the rest, we are safe. There is no
other way."

There was silence while the twilight deepened in the garden, and
the stars began to show above like flashing swords in the sky. In
the languor of love that knows no fear and has no cares, that
opiate of the soul, Dilama lay in his arms and sought his lips and
eyes, and asked no more about caravans and journeys and mountains,
drugged and heavy with love. In an hour when all was velvet
blackness beneath the wall, they kissed farewell. He scaled the
crumbling bricks, and regained the sheltering orange grove, and she
walked slowly back, drawing smooth her filmy veil, towards the
darkened palace.

Five days later at noontime, as Dilama was sitting i