She was silent.

"Would you rather be left quietly to your life with Mr. Armeen?"

"Oh, I'm sick of my life with him!" she cried out, desperately. "It
would be better if he were in camp tonight when I got back there; it
would be much better!"

"And if he were in camp--would you tell him?"

Contempt crawled in his voice.

"You are not like one of our women," he said. "They know how to do what
they want even behind the shutters of their husbands' houses. They are
clever women when they walk in the ways of love."

[Illustration]

He had made her feel like a child. He had struck hard upon her pride of
a successful demi-mondaine.

"Of course I shouldn't tell him!" she said. "But perhaps it would be
better if I did. For I'm tired of my life."

Again the horrible melancholy which so often comes to women of her type
and age, and of which she was so almost angrily afraid, flowed over her.
She must live as she wished to live in these few remaining years. She
must break out of prison quickly, or, when she did break out, there
would be no freedom that she could enjoy. She had so little time to
lose. She could tell nothing to Baroudi of all this, but perhaps she
could make him feel the force of her desire in such a way that an equal
force of answering desire would wake in him. Perhaps she had never
really exerted herself enough to put forth, when with him, all the
powers of her fascination, long tempered and tried in the blazing
furnaces of life.

The gusty wind died down across the sands, and again she heard the frail
sound of the desert lute. It wavered into her ears, like something
supple, yielding, insinuating.

There was a woman in that tent.

And she, Bella Donna, must go back to camp almost directly, and leave
Baroudi with that woman! She was being chastised with scorpions
to-night.

"Why did you come to this place?" she said.

"To be with you for an hour."

The irony, the gravity, that seemed almost cold in its calm, died out of
his eyes, and was replaced by a shining that changed his whole aspect.

There was the divine madness in him too, then. Or was it only the
madness that is not divine? She did not ask or care to know.

The night wind rose again, drowning the little notes of the desert lute.

* * * * *

That night, without being aware of it, Mrs. Armine crossed a Rubicon.
She crossed it when she came out of the big tent into the sands to go
back to the camp by the