He pulled a glass tube from one of his pockets and gave her a tabloid. She swallowed it down, with a mouthful of water, indifferently, but it soon did her good. She signed her women aside, and looked imploringly up at Sallie.
"I can't live through another night," she said, "and—neither will this man, unless you help me to help him. You will do that, won't you? He's an Englishman—a doctor—he has done all he possibly could for me—and I cannot die while I know that his life hangs on mine. It's too horrible—"
Sallie sat down again and clasped the wasted, writhing body closely to her in her strong, young arms.
"I'll do all I possibly can to help him," she promised in a quick whisper. The grey eyes behind the horrible scarlet hood had seemed to say that they would not hold her responsible for any promise given to lighten that poor creature's last hours. And the Emir's wife lay back against her shoulder with an exhausted sob of relief.
"I'm really an American," said a pleasant and very grateful voice from behind the mask which was gazing down at them so inscrutably now, "and no doctor at all." He was speaking to Sallie; the Emir's wife was still gasping for breath. "But—you can see for yourself how very harmful this nervous excitement must be to her."
"We must humour her—whatever may happen," his glance seemed to add, and Sallie nodded in quick understanding and sympathy.
She had been wondering what she, so helpless and uncertain herself, could possibly do to reassure the dying girl and help the man who was doomed.
"If I could get back on board the ship," she said somewhat uncertainly, in answer to the appealing look with which the Emir's wife was once more regarding her, "I would bring or send a boat ashore—"
The other girl's wan face displayed renewed life and animation.
"Soon after midnight," she whispered eagerly. "You must give me till then to do my part. But soon after midnight he will be waiting beyond the outermost of the guards at the shore-end of the ravine which leads from our camp. He'll be wearing that woman's cloak and veil, and carrying a bucket—I sometimes send her to the beach for sea-water to bathe my feet." She pointed to one of her slaves, but at that the man in the mask intervened.