She moved off as she spoke, into the night, meaning to cross over towards the orderlies' tent, then paused to glance back at the figure--which followed. "Are you coming, too?" she said, curtly. "I can manage all right."
"Of course I am coming!" replied Jim Forrester. "It is pitch dark, to begin with, and I can at least help you to find your patient. I think you had better keep outside the camp, so as to avoid the tent-ropes--it isn't any longer, really."
It was, if anything, shorter, but it brought them instantly into the grip, as it were, of the desert, which crept hungrily upon the camp on all sides; so that, ere they had gone five steps beyond the canvas wings of the tent, they seemed as much alone, as far from conventional twentieth-century life, as they had been two days before, when they first sat together as betrothed lovers in the sunset of a world of curves telling the tale of eternal, of unseen circlings. Even so much of Life's secret was invisible now. All they saw was a darkness they knew to be wilderness, a dim outline of themselves, close together, hand in hand. For with the knowledge that they were alone--perhaps with the memory of the wilderness--they had clasped hands instinctively, and for the time the sense of stress and strain had passed.
It returned again, however, with curious vividness, as, right in their path, a shadow, dim as their own, showed suddenly.
She knew who it was instinctively before it spoke.
"I thought you had fever," she said. "Why are you here?"
"I have been waiting the graciousness of the queen-lady," came the reply, and the voice was buoyant with joyous vitality. "I have to tell her my dreams--the fever always brings dreams, and I remember now! Yea! I remember all things from the beginning. So, if she will come, I will show her the lost city where we lived, and she will dream the dream also."
Dimly, in the darkness, she fancied she could see the shining of his eyes, see his beckoning hand. What her lover saw was a movement of the shadow towards the wilderness: what he felt was a faint increase in the distance between his hand and hers which made him claim it again.
"Queenie!" he cried, "what are you thinking of? You can't possibly go now. The man is delirious with fever--surely you hear that in his voice. You had better come back to the tent and let me send someone to take him into shelter and look after him."
For an instant no one spoke, and then it seemed almost a bodiless voice from the desert which broke the silence, for in his desire to detain her, Jim Forrester had drawn the girl back a pace or two, so that the darkness lay deeper between their two shadows and that third one nearer the wilderness.