ng back. Oh, how extraordinary it is to
think we lived so many years without knowing of each other's existence,
that we lived alone. Were you ever happy?"

He hesitated before he replied.

"I sometimes thought I was."

"But do you think now you ever really were?"

"I don't know--perhaps in a lonely sort of way."

"You can never be happy in that way now?"

He said nothing, but, after a moment, he kissed her long and hard, and
as if he wanted to draw her being into his through the door of his lips.

"Good-bye," he said, releasing her. "I shall be back directly after
sundown."

"Yes. Don't wait for the dark down there. If you were lost in the
dunes!"

She pointed to the distant sand hills rising and falling monotonously to
the horizon.

"If you are not back in good time," she said, "I shall stand by the
tower and wave a brand from the fire."

"Why by the tower?"

"The ground is highest by the tower."

She watched him ride away on a mule, with two Arabs carrying guns. They
went towards the plains of saltpetre that looked like snow beside the
sea that was only a mirage. Then she turned back into the tent, took
up a volume of Fromentin's, and sat down in a folding-chair at the tent
door. She read a little, but it was difficult to read with the mirage
beneath her. Perpetually her eyes were attracted from the book to its
mystery and plaintive sadness, that was like the sadness of something
unearthly, of a spirit that did not move but that suffered. She did not
put away the book, but presently she laid it down on her knees, open,
and sat gazing. Androvsky had disappeared with the Arabs into some fold
of the sands. The sun-ray had vanished with him. Without Androvsky and
the sun--she still connected them together, and knew she would for ever.

The melancholy of this desert scene was increased for her till it became
oppressive and lay upon her like a heavy weight. She was not a woman
inclined to any morbid imaginings. Indeed, all that was morbid roused
in her an instinctive disgust. But the sudden greyness of the weather,
coming after weeks of ardent sunshine, and combined with the fantastic
desolation of the landscape, which was half real and half unreal, turned
her for the moment towards a dreariness of spirit that was rare in her.

She realised suddenly, as she looked and did not see Androvsky even as a
black and moving speck upon the plain; what the desert would seem to her
without him, even in sunshine, the