In the midst of his happiness a sense of shame overwhelmed him.
Margaret had come to him because she understood; his sense of shame
evoked her sympathy. He heard her say, "But Mike, I shall understand.
I think something outside myself will help me to understand."
He could see her starlit face. He remembered how he had turned it up to the heavens and said, "You beautiful Meg, the stars adore you!" His own words rang in his ears.
She had come to help him to make his love for her still more complete. She was with him still. He enfolded her in his arms and wept out his passion on her breast.
CHAPTER V
"Let's begin where we left off yesterday, Mike," Millicent said.
They had finished their lunch and were sitting in the desert watching the "common or garden" day's idleness of the inhabitants of a Bedouin camp. The tents were huddled together under the shade of some feathery-leaved palm-trees, a typical desert homestead.
They had made a short excursion from the site of their own camp, for the sick man's condition had necessitated their halting for at least one whole day.
Subtly conscious of the fact that Satan finds some mischief even in the desert for idle hands to do, Michael had suggested a picnic to a small oasis which lay to the west of their route. Millicent and her dragoman and her servants still formed a part of his camp; her splendid supply of food and medicines was so valuable for the saint that Michael's silent consent to her presence had been given. Again he was drifting.
"Let us return to where we left off yesterday," referred to her suggestion of the evening before that they should tell each other of the most English thing they could imagine, things seen in England as in comparison to things seen in Egypt.
It was a typically Eastern scene which lay before them—the yellow sands of the Arabian desert, the dark palm-trees and the picturesque Bedouins idling under the shelter of the palms. Not one of the group was occupied. Some goats and a great number of naked children were lying about on the sand. The purple shadows of the palm-trees intensified the bareness of the sunny desert.