He found himself on a little balcony overlooking the hotel garden. He knew the place in daytime—palms and shrubs and a graveled walk and painted chairs where he had drunk tea with Jinny and watched a Russian tourist beautifully smoking cigarettes.
Now the place was strange. Night and a crescent moon had wrought their magic, and the garden was a mystery of velvet dusks and ivory pallors. The graveled path ran glimmering beneath the magnolias. Over the wall's blankness the eucalyptus defined its crooked lines against the blue Egyptian sky.
No living thing was there ... nothing ... or did that shadow stir? There, just at the path's end.
Ryder's lithe strength was swift. There was one breathless moment of pursuit, then his hand fell with gripping fierceness upon the huddled dark figure that had sped so frantically to the tiny door in the garden's end.... A moment more and she would have been through.
His hand on her shoulder turned her towards him. Her eyes met his with a dash of desperation.... He was unconscious how his own were blazing ... how queerly white his face had gone under its desert brown.
She was actually running away. She had meant never to see him again. He had frustrated her, but the blow she had meant to deal him was still felt.
His voice, when it came, sounded shaken.
"You were going to leave me?"
Strangely her eyes changed. The defiance, the panic fear, faded. A cloud of slow despair welled up in them.
"What else?" she said very softly.