The next instant she had tripped and fallen heavily on her face over a tangled tuft of grass concealing an unusually deep descent of a desert wave. As she picked herself up, confused, somewhat dazed, and paused to free her eyes from the sand grains which clouded them, something almost at her feet brought her back to realities, and she gave a quick exclamation. For in the hollow beneath the wave, where he had evidently sought shelter deliberately, Jim Forrester lay curled up comfortably, fast asleep. At least, so it seemed, though Khesroo's quaint old bow must surely make rather an uncomfortable pillow.
She stooped over the sleeping man, and for an instant her face whitened; she bent lower to listen to his breathing. And as she listened a couple of startled sand-chaffs fled from a neighbouring thorn bush, their chuckling cry echoing over the desert like an evil laugh.
But a minute afterwards, in answer to her touch, Jim Forrester was staring at her trying to collect his sleep-scattered senses.
"Hullo!" he said, slowly. "How on earth did I--Ah! I remember. That brute of a goatherd played the garden ass and I lost him, so after wandering about for hours, I turned in till daylight. But you--my dearest dear----"
He started to his feet as he realised her presence there, and held out both his hands to her.
As he did so, something dropped from them and lay glittering on the sand at his feet. It was a gold coin.
They looked at each other, amazed; then she stooped and picked it up.
"A double profile," she said slowly, holding it so as to catch the growing sunlight, "and the legend round"--she spelt it out from the Greek lettering--"'Basileus Basileon.'"
"And the date," he cried, "the date!"
"Yes, the date is there," she replied, still more slowly turning to the obverse, "the bird and the date--it is all right--but I was thinking of the other----"