After all, such marriages had taken place, thousands of them, so why should not his with the beautiful girl be added to the list, the outcome thereof proving the proverbial exception to the inevitable disastrous ending of all such unions?
Why did he deny himself?
Just because he loved the girl with the same all-sacrificing love his white mother had given his Arabian father.
If it had been otherwise, with never a second thought he would have lifted the girl, as doubtlessly his ancestors had oft-times lifted women in their gazus or raids, and left the consequences in the hands of that old beldame Fate.
So it had been decided to start the day after the morrow by private and swiftest steam-boat to Luxor, where Damaris, shepherded by Jane Coop and under the social wing of Lady Thistleton, would sojourn at the Winter Palace Hotel until such time as her godmother should see fit to return from her errand of mercy to the House 'an Mahabbha in the Oasis of Khargegh.
Thus, whilst Jane Coop slept placidly and Maria Hobson wrestled under the bed-covering in the last throes of a nightmare in which, as a camel, she packed parcels of sand wrapped in tissue-paper, in trunks which stretched across an endless desert, Damaris drove out to the Obelisk for her last ride on the stallion Sooltan.
She rode out into the shadows, the dawn having barely lifted the hem of night's purple raiment from the edge of the world; out into the desert stretching silver-grey, soundless, half-waking; just stirred by the light touch of the breeze, which, heralding the dawn, sends little spirals of sand dancing away to the east and away to the west and blows out the stars one by one.
And she rode listlessly, knowing that no desert would ever be as this desert, or dawn as this passing of the night, or liberty as this hour of freedom in the wastes of sand.
And then, when perhaps ten, perhaps more or less, miles out, she pulled the stallion sharply and sat forward, staring, whilst her heart thrilled in a most unwarrantable manner beneath her coat.
Upon a hummock of sand, with tattered robes of saffron, purple and of gold about his feet, there sat a youth.