awfulness of the desolation of it,
the horror of its distances. And realising this she also realised the
uncertainty of the human life in connection with any other human life.
To be dependent on another is to double the sum of the terrors of
uncertainty. She had done that.

If the immeasurable sands took Androvsky and never gave him back to her!
What would she do?

She gazed at the mirage sea with its dim red islands, and at the sad
white plains along its edge.

Winter--she would be plunged in eternal winter. And each human life
hangs on a thread. All deep love, all consuming passion, holds a great
fear within the circle of a great glory. To-day the fear within the
circle of her glory seemed to grow. But she suddenly realised that she
ought to dominate it, to confine it--as it were--to its original and
permanent proportions.

She got up, came out upon the edge of the hill, and walked along it
slowly towards the tower.

Outside, freed from the shadow of the tent, she felt less oppressed,
though still melancholy, and even slightly apprehensive, as if some
trouble were coming to her and were near at hand. Mentally she had made
the tower the limit of her walk, and therefore when she reached it she
stood still.

It was a squat, square tower, strongly constructed, with loopholes in
the four sides, and now that she was by it she saw built out at the back
of it a low house with small shuttered windows and a narrow courtyard
for mules. No doubt Androvsky was right and French soldiers had once
been here to work the optic telegraph. She thought of the recruits and
of Marseilles, of Notre Dame de la Garde, the Mother of God, looking
towards Africa. Such recruits came to live in such strange houses as
this tower lost in the desert and now abandoned. She glanced at the
shuttered windows and turned back towards the tent; but something in the
situation of the tower--perhaps the fact that it was set on the highest
point of the ground--attracted her, and she presently made Batouch bring
her out some rugs and ensconced herself under its shadow, facing the
mirage sea.

How long she sat there she did not know. Mirage hypnotises the
imaginative and suggests to them dreams strange and ethereal, sad
sometimes, as itself. How long she might have sat there dreaming,
but for an interruption, she knew still less. It was towards evening,
however, but before evening had fallen, that a weary and travel-stained
party of three French soldier