'You've been asleep, Lettice,' he whispered, 'and actually dreaming—all in five minutes.'
She rubbed her eyes slowly, as though sand was in them. She stared into his face a moment before she spoke.
'Yes, I dreamed,' she answered with a little frightened sigh. 'I dreamed of you——There was a tent—the flap lifted suddenly—oh, it was so vivid! Then there was a crowd and awful drums were beating—and my river with the floating faces was there and I plunged in to save one—it was yours, Tom, yours——'
She paused for a fraction of a second, while his heart went thumping against his ribs. He did not speak. He waited.
'Then somehow you were taken from me,' she went on; 'you left me, Tom.' Her voice sank. 'And it broke my heart in two.'
'Lettice…!'
He made a sudden movement in the sand—at which moment, precisely, Tony's head appeared above the neighbouring dune, the rest of his body following it immediately.
And it seemed to Tom that his cousin came upon them out of the heart of a dream, out of the earth, out of a sandy tomb. His very existence, for those minutes, had been utterly forgotten, obliterated. He rose from the dead and came towards them over the hot, yellow desert. The distant hills—the Theban Hills above the Valley of the Kings—disgorged him. And, as once before, he looked dreadful, threatening, his great hands held out in front of him. He came gliding down the yielding slope. He caught them!
In that second—it was but the fraction of a second actually—the impression upon Tom's mind was acute and terrible. Speech and movement were not in him anywhere; he could only sit and stare, both terrified and fascinated. Between himself and Lettice stretched an interval of six feet certainly, and into this very gap, the figure of his cousin, followed and preceded by heaps of moving sand, descended now. It was towards Lettice that Tony came so swiftly gliding.
It was his cousin surely…?