The dusk was falling over them with grateful coolness as, eight hours later, they rode over the brink of the gorge and saw below them the black spectral shape of camel's-hair tents and the white dwellings of the duar. A lantern newly lit twinkled a welcome. A stallion neighed a greeting from his pickets as he heard the sound of advancing hoofs, and a couple of men in white uniform came to the door of a white-domed hovel and stood awaiting them.
One, a dapper, black-moustached little man with the Geneva Cross upon his sleeve, hastened to help Miss Van Arlen to alight.
"Monsieur sleeps, Mademoiselle," he informed her, as she reached the ground. "It is a matter of temperatures—and the subsequent weakness. Mademoiselle may have good hope that matters will yet go well."
His smile was reassuring and, in spite of his obvious youth, almost paternal. At the tent door he turned and laid his finger upon his lips. There must be no feminine want of self-restraint, he implied. The sight of one dear to her in his hour of helplessness must not leave her unstrung. She must be brave.
She followed with her father into the shadows within.
He lay with his arms outflung. A light coverlet was over him, but the damp of perspiration gleamed upon his forehead and neck. He moved restlessly, breathing with a panting sound.
"We poise much on Monsieur's recognition of Mademoiselle when he wakes," explained the orderly, and offered a smirk of intelligent sympathy to Mademoiselle's father.
She looked down, and a strange sense of unreality in the situation seized her. The white, fever-stricken face on the pillow seemed a spectre—a caricature of something familiar. A queer sense of anger, as if some well-liked possession had been meddled with and defaced by outsiders, rose in her heart. An instinct which she could not explain set her kneeling beside the pallet bed, her eyes fixed on its occupant.
Wearily, drowsily, Aylmer opened his eyes.
And then his smile dawned, slowly, incredulously, till the glory of assurance had become convincing. He pronounced her name.