e attitude of appeal.

Suddenly her imagination folded her in her lover's arms. She heard him
say, "My beautiful Meg, the stars adore you!"

And she answered, "I am with you, Mike, just as I was on that night
when your love made a new world for me. You called to me and so I
came. Your arms are round me. . . . I can hear your voice."

Margaret sighed. Consciousness of her material surroundings was
returning. She heard a step behind her; someone was present. It was
Freddy.

"What are you doing, Meg?" he said anxiously.

She turned swiftly to him. "Oh, Freddy, Michael wanted me. My dream
was too real not to have some meaning. I couldn't bear it--I had to
try to help him!"

"You were dreaming? You were in bed?"

"Yes, and sound asleep. Suddenly he called me. It was extraordinarily
real." Meg put her hands up to her head as though it was tired.

"But you can't help him by standing out here. It's too chilly."

Meg shivered. "It is cold," she said wearily. "And I'm awfully tired."

Freddy linked his arm through his sister's. "Let's sit and talk
together indoors, for a bit. Have a cigarette?"

Meg thanked him with tired eyes. Freddy put his hands on her shoulders
as she sank into a deck-chair, and looked into her eyes. "No more
visions, old girl?"

"No, Freddy, oh no, no vision." Meg spoke dreamily, absently, and with
an exhaustion which worried her brother.

"Then why so tired?"

"I don't know. I suppose it was my dream. I feel as if I'd travelled
for days and days!"

"Look here, you're going to have some of this." Freddy poured out a
small portion of brandy into a glass and made her swallow it. "The
desert plays the dickens with the strongest nerves. Don't be so rash
again, Meg."

"I promise." Meg swallowed the brandy and Freddy lit her cigarette.
With a tact she little dreamed of he contrived to divert her thoughts
into a channel far removed from the eastern desert and personal matters.

The news from home for the last few weeks had been far from
satisfactory. English politics seemed to revolve round the atrocious
acts of the suffragettes who believed in the militant policy and the
disturbances in Ireland. Freddy's sympathies, of course, were with
Ulster; the Nationalists and Sinn Feiners belonged to the unemployable
unemployed class of agitators who "walk on their heads."

When at last the brother and sister parted, Meg was restored both in
mind and body to her normal hea