and investigation of the track of small footprints, and the horizon,
came Wellington.

He was very hot and very thirsty, and it seemed to him that he had been
walking for many days through many, many endless deserts, but he
intended to criss-cross the Sahara, or any other desert, through all
eternity, until he could deliver the book he held between his
formidable teeth to his beloved mistress.

And she slid from the saddle, and knelt, and put her arms around him,
and took the somewhat moist keepsake from him.

She swung up like a bird into her lover's arms and took the reins
whilst he leant right down to lift the dog. But Wellington's great
heart was troubled. He looked up at his mistress and said as plainly
as could be with reproachful eyes. "Two's company," and turned to walk
stubbornly and heavily, back across those many, many deserts to the
tents.

Ben Kelham cheered him on as they thundered past him. "We'll wait for
you, old fellow," he cried, then looked down on the woman he loved.

Her hands were clasped upon the silken bodice where she had pinned the
brooch which had been fashioned in the shape of the Hawk of Egypt.

It was not there.

It had come unfastened as she lay in her grief; she had left it to be
buried so deep just a few days later, when the greatest storm which had
ever been known to sweep the desert piled the sand, the desert's own
cloak, to the height of hills, under which slumbered all those who had
sought peace at her breast; under which, guarded throughout all ages by
his dogs, peacefully slept her son.

"Ben," she cried, opening wide her eyes in which shone love and tears,
"Ben, can you ever--ever forgive me?"

And he bent and kissed her as he replied:

"There is nothing to forgive, beloved of my heart--I love you!"

THE END

Transcriber's note:

A number of words in this book are Arabic, using characters that
require Unicode to render properly.

I opted to use standard ASCII characters throughout the book, then to
list those words here, indicating which characters require Unicode.

Words are listed in the order in which they appear in each chapter. If
a word appears more than once in a chapter, it is listed only once. If
it appears in multiple chapters, it is listed only in the first chapter
in which it appeared.

Words are case-sensitive, i.e. if a word uses the same upper and lower
case character in a chapter, both forms are listed, because of the
dif