r and her mouth, in the scarlet glow
of her dress; there was no brightness in her face. The eyes were vacant
as they watched the green lizard glide over the wall beyond, and the
lips were parted with a look of unspeakable fatigue; the tire, not
of the limbs, but of the heart. She had come thither, hoping to leave
behind her on the desert wind that alien care, that new, strange
passion, which sapped her strength, and stung her pride, and made her
evil with such murderous lust of vengeance; and they were with her
still. Only something of the deadly, biting ferocity of jealousy had
changed into a passionate longing to be as that woman was who had his
love; into a certain hopeless, sickening sense of having forever lost
that which alone could have given her such beauty and such honor in the
sight of men as those this woman had.

To her it seemed impossible that this patrician who had his passion
should not return it. To the child of the camp, though she often mocked
at caste, all the inexorable rules, all the reticent instincts of
caste, were things unknown. She would have failed to comprehend all the
thousand reasons which would have forbidden any bond between the great
aristocrat and a man of low grade and of dubious name. She only thought
of love as she had always seen it, quickly born, hotly cherished, wildly
indulged, and without tie or restraint.

"And I came without my vengeance!" she mused. To the nature that felt
the ferocity of the vendetta a right and a due, there was wounding
humiliation in her knowledge that she had left her rival unharmed, and
had come hither, out from his sight and his presence, lest he should
see in her one glimpse of that folly which she would have killed herself
under her own steel rather than have been betrayed, either for his
contempt or his compassion.

"And I came without my vengeance!" she mused, in that oppressive noon,
in that gray and lonely place, in that lofty tower-solitude, where there
was nothing between her and the hot, hard, cruel blue of the heavens,
vengeance looked the only thing that was left her; the only means
whereby that void in her heart could be filled, that shame in her life
be washed out. To love! and to love a man who had no love for her, whose
eyes only beheld another's face, whose ears only thirsted for
another's voice! Its degradation stamped her a traitress in her own
sight--traitress to her code, to her pride, to her country, to her flag!

And yet, at t