She hardly noticed the pain within herself now, torn as she was with anxiety for her father and friends.
Alice rose, ready to oblige.
"I go fetch him," she said.
Leaving the tent, she interviewed one of the guards. Then she passed on beyond Pansy's view.
She reappeared some few moments later accompanied by a short, stoutish man with a pointed, black beard, unmistakably of French nationality, who was dressed in a neat white drill suit and a sun helmet.
Anxiously Pansy watched him approach, with no room in her mind to think how he came to be there, a person as European as herself, in this savage Sultan's following.
"Do tell me what has happened!" she said, without any preliminaries, the moment he halted at her bedside.
However, Edouard did not tell Pansy much more than she had already culled for herself. But she learnt that the whole of her father's party were prisoners in the hands of this desert chief and were now on their way back to his capital.
"But can't you do something?" she asked in despair.
"I'm virtually a prisoner, like yourself," Edouard replied in a non-committal tone.