She lay on her bed, under the muslin mosquito net through which strained the pearly gleam of a lantern. Once more it was all an illusion which must be allowed to endure till reality could be gained. For Lilla, the only reality was comprised at this moment into one more meeting with him, in the sight of his living face, in the sound of his voice pronouncing words of forgiveness, of love, perhaps even of remorse. Should she reach him too late for that—find this longing also part of the illusion? The prophesy of Anna Zanidov had gained a still greater power from those deep forests, those sudden apparitions in vaporous clearings of men armed with gleaming spears, and now from the greenish infiltration of the moonlight.
Another lion roared in the depths of the night.
"Why should one fear even these strange forms of death? What has my life been that I should find it precious? What does anything matter except one hour with him? I really ask only a moment. No, all that I fear is death before I find him, before I've won from him a last kiss of understanding and pardon. Will! That shall be my strength and my immunity all the way!"
At last she dozed, to dream that Hamoud had confronted a lion just as the beast was about to pounce upon Madame Zanidov, who, wearing the dress of oxidized silver barbarically painted, crouched in a moonlit clearing. "No, Hamoud, let him have her!" Hamoud, with a smile, stood aside. Then she saw Lawrence approaching, his face and body wrapped in a white cloth. "Too late," he uttered, and was unveiling his face when she sat up in bed with a scream.
Instantly the curtain let in a flash of moonlight. Hamoud stood at the bedside, his hand on the hilt of his dagger. From behind him entered the voices Of the guards calling out to one another. Then a murmur of other voices broke like a wave.
"There is nothing here," Hamoud said gently, when he had looked round the tent. As she made no reply, he was about to withdraw; but, kneeling down, instead, he raised the weighted hem of the mosquito net, to take her hand and press it to his brow.
"Sleep always without fear. Till Hamoud is dead no harm shall come to you."
"And dreams?" she moaned, letting her hand go limp in his frozen grasp. "Oh, Hamoud, and dreams?"
In the pearly light, beneath the cloudy net, in the air that was fragrant with the odors of soap and cologne, her upturned countenance and swelling throat gave forth a gleam as if of flesh transfigured by love instead of grief. He felt himself falling through space into a bottomless anguish. He clutched at the thought, "Yet who knows His designs?" and hung in that void alive, his secret still locked in his breast, the delicious pain of her daily condescension still assured to him.
"Ah, if you were of my faith you would have heard that life is all a dream, that there is no reality except paradise and hell."