n. In two or three seconds the camel snarled
furiously again.

"The Bedouin he make him do that to tell us where he is," said Ibrahim.

He cried out some words in Arabic. A violent guttural voice replied out
of the darkness. In a moment, under the lee of a sand dune, they came
upon two muffled figures holding two camels, which were lying down. Upon
one there was a sort of palanquin, in which Mrs. Armine took her seat,
with a Bedouin sitting in front. A stick was plied. The beast protested,
filling the hollow of the night with a complaint that at last became
almost leonine; then suddenly rose up, was silent, and started off at a
striding trot.

Mrs. Armine could not measure either the time that elapsed or the space
that was covered during that journey. She was filled with a sense of
excitement and adventure that she had never experienced before, and that
made her feel oddly young. The dark desert, swept by the chilling
breeze, became to her suddenly a place of strong hopes and of desires
leaping towards fulfilment. She was warmed through and through by
expectation, as she had not been warmed by the great camp fire that had
been kindled to greet Nigel. And when at last in the distance there
shone out a light, like an earth-bound star, to her all the desert
seemed glowing with an almost exultant radiance.

But the light was surely far away, for though the dromedary swung on
over the desert, it did not seem to her to grow clearer or brighter, but
like a distant eye it regarded her with an almost cruel steadiness, as
if it calmly read her soul.

And she thought of Baroudi's eyes, and looking again at the yellow
light, she felt as if he were watching her calmly from some fastness of
the sands to which she could not draw near.

In the desert it is difficult to measure distances. Just as Mrs. Armine
was thinking that she could never gain that light, it broadened, broke
up into forms, the forms of leaping flames blown this way and that by
the stealthy wind of the waste, became abruptly a fire revealing vague
silhouettes of camels, of crouching men, of tents, of guard dogs, of
hobbled horses. She was in the midst of a camp pitched far out in a
lonely place of the sands within sight of no oasis.

The dromedary knelt. She was on her feet with Ibrahim standing beside
her.

For a moment she felt dazed. She stood still, consciously pressing her
feet down against the sand which glowed in the light from the flames.
She saw eye