"Once more you shall cast your die. The table is the sand of Egypt, the dice-cup is your hand, the dice are your life and my life, the stakes our happiness. Decide again and quickly for I hear the rumbling of wheels. Make known your choice, for although we travellers through the desert of life lie down to sleep, and rise again to live, to fight, to hate, and above all to love, in obedience to the will which counteth and heapeth the particles of sand upon this station, yet are we allowed, to voice our desires, being mouth-pieces of Fate. Nay! wait one moment until I make clear the way, so that you may not put down your beautiful feet blindly upon a trackless waste of doubt and mistrust. If you come with me to-night, you come alone. I have no woman in my desert home, excepting one old hunchback slave, a withered bough but faithful. No woman has set foot within the belt of palms surrounding my house, and without the sand stretches! Mile upon mile of pathless sand!
"You will come into the desert alone with me, and the sand will close in upon you and keep you in the desert alone—with me!
"If you come, be at the gate of yonder pink house at nine to-night; if you are not there I shall know that your heart has failed."
But the soul of the desert glinted for one moment in the English girl's eyes.
"There may be no woman there, but there will be a man—a man indeed!" she whispered, as though communing with herself.
And the eyes so soft and blue looked up, and then down, down into the soul of Hahmed the Arab, so deeply indeed that a shiver ran from her brain to her finger-ends, causing her to draw herself together sharply and to turn and walk away.
* * * * * *
So it came about as it was written that she had decided when the brakes grinded, and that after retrieving her employer for the last time, and placing her in a dusty corner of the stifling carriage, she slipped away on the excuse of finding her dressing-case, which she did, taking it with her into a corner of the deserted waiting-room just as the engine announced its immediate departure.
Without a qualm she watched "her crowd" jostle and push their way into the small carriages, and the train, move out, leaving her alone—alone in the desert town, alone with the dweller of that desert.
A wave of exultation rushed through her as she thought of this her great adventure, of this her freedom for at least a short while, and of the unknown quantity she was mixing into her portion of daily bread which, up to this moment, had consisted of the plainest, wholesomest, most uninteresting bun-loaf, not even resembling that extremely dull and unappetising cake named, I believe, Swiss roll, which hides its staleness under the glass case of Life's shop window, lying fly-blown on the plate and heavily and unimaginatively on the digestive powers of those who consume it for the thin layer of jam to be discovered between its wedges of sullen dough. A soul-stifling mess to be found in the drab sideboards of most English households along with its sister made of a pastry so flimsy that it chokes, filled with a cream that is merely froth, the whole hiding its cheapness under an application of highly coloured paint essence, the consuming of which will prove as fatal as the Swiss roll.