on its rider. It sprang at the bank and mounted
like a wild cat. There was a noise of falling stones, a shower of
scattered earth-clods dropping downward, and he was beside her, white
with dust, streaming with sweat, panting as if the labouring breath
would rip his chest open, with the horse's foam on his forehead, and a
savage and yet exultant gleam in his eyes.

They looked at each other in silence, while their horses, standing
quietly, lowered their narrow, graceful heads and touched noses with
delicate inquiry. Then she said:

"I almost thought----"

She stopped.

"Yes?" he said, on a great gasping breath that was like a sob.

"--that you were off to the centre of the earth, or--I don't know what I
thought. You aren't hurt?"

"No."

He could only speak in monosyllables as yet. She looked his horse over.

"He won't give much more trouble just now. Shall we ride back?"

As she spoke she threw a longing glance at the far desert, at the verge
of which was a dull green line betokening the distant palms of an oasis.

Androvsky shook his head.

"But you----" She hesitated. "Perhaps you aren't accustomed to horses,
and with that saddle----"

He shook his head again, drew a tremendous breath and said

"I don't care, I'll go on, I won't go back."

He put up one hand, brushed the foam from his streaming forehead, and
said again fiercely:

"I won't go back."

His face was extraordinary with its dogged, passionate expression
showing through the dust and the sweat; like the face of a man in a
fight to the death, she thought, a fight with fists. She was glad at his
last words and liked the iron sound in his voice.

"Come on then."

And they began to ride towards the dull green line of the oasis, slowly
on the sandy waste among the little round humps where the dusty cluster
of bushes grew.

"You weren't hurt by the fall?" she said. "It looked a bad one."

"I don't know whether I was. I don't care whether I was."

He spoke almost roughly.

"You asked me to ride with you," he added. "I'll ride with you."

She remembered what Batouch had said. There was pluck in this man,
pluck that surged up in the blundering awkwardness, the hesitation, the
incompetence and rudeness of him like a black rock out of the sea. She
did not answer. They rode on, always slowly. His horse, having had its
will, and having known his strength at the end of his incompetence,
went quietly, though always with that feathery, light, tr