"Everest, good-bye; but it is not for long, is it? You will come up to Scotland soon, won't you—I can never forget."
She saw a new expression pass over his face which she did not understand; but how beautiful, how wonderful his face was, no matter what look it wore. She gazed upon it wistfully. Oh, to be in Regina's place, to be lying in that tent, waited on, tended by, caressed and loved by him! How bitterly she envied her!
"Good-bye, Sybil! Please do not think of our meeting again. I do not wish it, and if it has to be I shall regret it." Sybil sat dumb, stupefied, feeling mad with a useless misery.
"How can you be so unkind just at the last," she whispered.
"I do not want to be unkind, but I don't wish you to look forward to impossibilities."
Sybil could not answer. There was an iron inflexibility in his tone against which all words of hers would seem to break in vain. She sat upright on the camel, and Everest fell back to speak to Graham, who came towards him from the tent.
The men shook hands coldly, without any demonstration either of friendliness or enmity. All the events of that wretched camping had rolled into the past, and no words and no acts could alter them now.
When Merton had mounted the whole line started and moved off slowly to the west, making for the next stopping place, which they hoped to reach before dawn, and where they would rest through the heat of the day. The red of the sunset hung in a fiery glow before them, in the east behind them was rising steadily the silver moon.
Sybil's brain seemed to swim in mists of rage as she was borne forward. From the very first she had planned and schemed and worked for herself with that steady singleness of aim which is supposed to ensure success, and yet she had failed, failed and lost. Regina, unselfish, careless, reckless, she had won. She had trusted to Everest, and he had not denied her claims. Then she had risked her life, thrown herself absolutely into the jaws of death, and yet she had not been called upon to pay the full price, she had been allowed to come out of it all alive and crowned as a heroine. It was not like life, it was like a Sunday school tale, where the good are always saved and praised and the selfish are always punished. Sybil ground her teeth and the tears brimmed over her eyes. Why was she so favoured? Girls who lived as Regina was doing were abandoned every day, yet Everest meant to marry her. She knew he would never have spoken as he had unless he meant it. People who risked their lives for others generally had to give them up. Why should she be spared and come back smiling, to be nursed by him to health again?
As the camel swung forward, bearing her away from the camp and that dear figure standing there, a suffocating sense of the injustice of Fate, an agonised realisation of failure, rode beside her into the dark shades of the falling night. The three men turned back into the camp when the procession grew indistinct in the red distance.