e her senses. Her
hair was spread out on the pillow to frame her colorless face, which
had now attained indeed the look of the "angelic messenger." But the
angelic messenger, the bearer of life to him, seemed to David on the
point of returning to the source of life.

He sat at the bedside, sometimes unable to extend his hand to touch her
hand, as though his strength were wholly a reflection of her strength,
so that with the latter's waning the former must flicker out.

"What is it?" he thought, lost in misery and wonder.

The physicians and the nurse looked at him askance, their secret pent
in behind their lips.

He felt round him the pressure of this secret. The air was full of
thoughts that he could not apprehend. Behind the benignant evasiveness
of the doctors he seemed to discern a fact, like a thunderbolt
withheld. He recoiled from his conjectures, to cower amid these
shadows which he felt might be less agonizing than that flash of light.

There was no reason for alarm, they told him. And instead of being
mysterious it was a perfectly defined case of nerves, hysteria,
emotional collapse.

Ah, yes; but from what cause?

Even Hamoud, he was sure, knew something that he did not know. The
Arab, while apparently as solicitous as ever, was changed. He had
taken on, merely in his physical aspect, a new quality: he seemed
taller than formerly, and older. Amid all his tasks he moved with a
sort of feline restlessness. He took to prowling at night, round and
round the bleak garden. The robed figure paced the paths with an
effect of stealing carefully toward an enemy. In the light from a
window his fine profile appeared for an instant like a presentment of
vengeance--with something sensual in its look of cruelty.

Now and then, in the middle of the night, David became aware that
Hamoud had entered the room without a sound, to watch him from the
deepest mass of shadows. One could make out only the pale blotch that
was his white skullcap, and the long pale streak that was the uncovered
portion of his white under robe. The eyes, the expression of the face,
were lost in blackness.

"I thought you called."

And he was gone.

In his own room, having noiselessly closed and locked the door, he drew
from his bosom the Koran. Holding the book reverently in his small,
right hand, he raised his head, and stood waiting with closed eyes for
inspiration. Presently, opening the Koran, he read:

"The doom of Go