ough the ghastly twilight of the half-lit plains,
now flooded with lustre as the moon emerged, now engulfed in darkness as
the stormy western winds drove the cirri over it. But neither darkness
nor light differed to her; she noted neither; she was like one drunk
with strong wine, and she had but one dread--that the power of her horse
would give way under the unnatural strain made on it, and that she would
reach too late, when the life she went to save would have fallen for
ever, silent unto death, as she had seen the life of Marquise _fall_.

Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the animal quiver
under the spur, and she heard the catch in his panting breath as he
strained to give his fleetest and best, that told her how, ere long, the
racing speed, the extended gallop at which she kept him, would tell, and
beat him down despite his desert strain. She had no pity; she would have
killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was giving her own
life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this thing, to
save even the man condemned to die with the rising of the sun. She did
not spare herself; and she would have spared no living thing, to fulfil
the mission that she undertook. She loved with the passionate blindness
of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern blood. If to
spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, she would have given the
word for their destruction without a moment's pause.

Once from some screen of gaunt and barren rock a shot was fired at her,
and flew within a hair's-breadth of her brain; she never even looked
around to see whence it had come; she knew it was from some Arab prowler
of the plains. Her single spark of light through the half-veiled lantern
passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau. And as she felt
the hours steal on--so fast, so hideously fast--with that horrible
relentlessness, "ohne Hast, ohne Rast," which tarries for no despair, as
it hastens for no desire, her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue clove to
the roof of her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her
brain.

What she dreaded came.

Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight was passed,
the animal strained with hard-drawn panting gasps to answer the demand
made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded
onward. In the lantern-light she saw his head stretched out in the
racing agony, his distended eyeballs, h