"Who can understand the mystery of our own hearts?" he answered bitterly. "They are just like this desert, full of the bright shining mirage of hope, and the oasis of beauty, and infested with the lions of passion and desire that are always prowling there in the darkness."
Regina looked up at him as he walked beside her. How well he knew life and spoke of it. Had not his passion for her sprung into her life suddenly as a lion and devoured her, and now perhaps was passing on, leaving her broken and destroyed as the mangled remains of a kid on the sand where a lion has fed. But yet he had led her to those oases and she had drunk deeply there of the sweetest waters of life, and he had shown her the shining mirage and dazzled her eyes with those beautiful phantom images she never could have seen without him. Yes, he was like the desert, and she could not hate him any more than man can hate the desert, in spite of its cruelty and the death it deals out to them. Deeply, marvellously pink, lower and lower, fell the light, like a mantle dropping on them and the face of the waste. They paused and looked back to the encampment. Palms and tents and the figures of the men and the feeding camels, all looked as if cut out of ruby, all in lustrous glowing red against the pale warm gold background of the sky. They sat down on a rising mound of the rippling sand, and he put his arm round her and drew her close to him till her head found its resting-place on his shoulder, and they were quite silent, fearing that any word should mar the deep hush, the infinite peace that seemed falling like a benediction from that far-arched crystal sky, and over the girl's brain came softly the lines of an old French song she had noted somewhere in her reading:
"Eloine de ton cœur le fiel qui voudrait s'y glisser.
Ce n'est point dans le cœur de femme que la haine doit s'y fixer."
And while she was resolving that never should that bitterness live in her heart for him, no matter what his crimes against her, he was questioning within himself why and how it was that, loving this woman as he did, this curious wild gust of emotion should have swayed him to another. He disliked Sybil, he had always done so. For years she had courted him in vain, and yet and yet, the sight of those lines of her ivory face, whenever he saw them, seemed to throw madness through all his veins. It would tear his heart in two to give up Regina, not for any reason on earth would he have parted with her, but like the deadly thirst that comes on a man after drinking alkali water and drives him back to drink of the poisonous thing again, his desire held him and lived with him against his will.
The rose light faded and died and twilight came up over the desert like a violet flood. Very slowly and lingeringly they rose and walked back to the tent together, as the fires of the camp were beginning to sparkle amongst the trees.
That same night Regina woke suddenly between the hour of midnight and dawn and sat up in bed with a wild fluttering at her heart. For a moment the bodily faintness, the whole strange series of physical feeling, was so great, she was not conscious of anything else. She turned to Everest for help and then saw she was alone. The bed and tent were alike empty, brilliant with the moonlight that poured through the canvas, bright as day.
Sick, dizzy and confused she sat up, gasping. Then a great joy vibrated suddenly all through her. It was true then. She felt convinced now that her unsubstantial hopes and thoughts were verified. A great delight filled her, the scene of the enchanted garden rushed back upon her and Everest's words. Now she might tell him, she could not be in doubt any longer.
Where was he, she wondered. All the faintness seemed to have passed again as suddenly as it came, all the cloud of bodily sensation to have whirled by. She only felt a great sense of happiness, an eagerness to share it with him.
She rose and found her dressing-gown and a pair of shoes and crossed the tent, all filled with white light, to the door, pulled aside the flap and looked out. It was a very still night, the palms lifted their feathery tops in stately majesty against the glorious purple of the star-filled sky without a quiver of the lightest leaf, their shadows lay in velvety blackness on the silvered golden of the sand. Not a sound disturbed the deep silence; the air came to her light and pure and cool. Beyond the palm grove, far out into the limitless distance she could see the desert roll like a rippling silver sea beneath the moon rays.