“The ring of your mistress! Not for me, if I know it! Do you think I want to be paid?”
“The ring was my mother's,” he answered her simply. “And I offer it only as souvenir.”
She lost all her color and all her fiery wrath; his grave and gentle courtesy always strangely stilled and rebuked her; but she raised the ring off the ground where she had flung it, and placed it back in his hand.
“If so, still less should you part with it. Keep it; it will bring you happiness one day. As for me, I have done nothing!”
“You have done what I value the more for that noble disclaimer. May I thank you thus, Little One?”
He stooped and kissed her; a kiss that the lips of a man will always give to the bright, youthful lips of a women, but a kiss, as she knew well, without passion, even without tenderness in it.
With a sudden impetuous movement, with a shyness and a refusal that had never been in her before, she wrested herself from him, her face burning, her heart panting, and plunged away from him into the depth of the shadow; and he never sought to follow her, but threw himself into saddle as his gray was brought up. Another instant, and, armed to the teeth, he rode out of the camp into the darkness of the silent, melancholy, lonely Arab night.