of conscription and lost among
the sands of the Libyan desert; and she read the girl's story.

That evening, as Wassef the camel-driver went to the mosque to pray,
Fatima cursed him, because now all the village laughed secretly at the
revenge that Wassef had taken upon the lover of his daughter. A few
laughed the harder because they knew Wassef would come to feel it had
been better to have chained Mahommed Selim to a barren fig-tree and
kept him there until he married Soada, than to let him go. He had
mischievously sent him into that furnace which eats the Fellaheen to
the bones, and these bones thereafter mark white the road of the Red Sea
caravans and the track of the Khedive's soldiers in the yellow sands.

When Fatima cursed Wassef he turned and spat at her; and she went back
and sat on the ground beside Soada, and mumbled tags from the Koran
above her for comfort. Then she ate greedily the food which Soada should
have eaten; snatching scraps of consolation in return for the sympathy
she gave.

The long night went, the next day came, and Soada got up and began to
work again. And the months went by.

II

One evening, on a day which had been almost too hot for even the
seller of liquorice-water to go by calling and clanging, Wassef the
camel-driver sat at the door of a malodorous cafe and listened to a
wandering welee chanting the Koran. Wassef was in an ill-humour: first,
because the day had been so hot; secondly, because he had sold his
ten-months' camel at a price almost within the bounds of honesty; and
thirdly, because a score of railway contractors and subs. were camped
outside the town. Also, Soada had scarcely spoken to him for three days
past.

In spite of all, Soada had been the apple of his eye, although he had
sworn again and again that next to a firman of the Sultan, a ten-months'
camel was the most beautiful thing on earth. He was in a bitter humour.
This had been an intermittent disease with him almost since the day
Mahommed Selim had been swallowed up by the Soudan; for, like her mother
before her, Soada had no mind to be a mat for his feet. Was it not even
said that Soada's mother was descended from an English slave with red
hair, who in the terrible disaster at Damietta in 1805 had been carried
away into captivity on the Nile, where he married a fellah woman and
died a good Mussulman?

Soada's mother had had red-brown hair, and not black as becomes a fellah
woman; but Wassef was proud of t