eet at the cross-roads. One gives the other
food or drink or medicine, and they move on again. And all grows dim
with time. And the camel-drivers are forgotten; but the cross-roads
remain, and the food and the drink and the medicine and the cattle
helped each caravan upon the way. Is it not enough?"

She placed her hand in his. It lay there for a moment. "God be with
thee, friend," he said.

The next instant Thomas Tilman Lacey's drawling voice broke the silence.

"There's something catching about these nights in Egypt. I suppose it's
the air. No wind--just the stars, and the ultramarine, and the nothing
to do but lay me down and sleep. It doesn't give you the jim-jumps like
Mexico. It makes you forget the world, doesn't it? You'd do things here
that you wouldn't do anywhere else."

The gate was opened by the bowab, and the two passed through. David was
standing by the brazier, his hand held unconsciously over the coals,
his eyes turned towards them. The reddish flame from the fire lit up his
face under the broad-brimmed hat. His head, slightly bowed, was thrust
forward to the dusk. Hylda looked at him steadily for a moment. Their
eyes met, though hers were in the shade. Again Lacey spoke. "Don't be
anxious. I'll see her safe back. Good-bye. Give my love to the girls."

David stood looking at the closed gate with eyes full of thought and
wonder and trouble. He was not thinking of the girl. There was no
sentimental reverie in his look. Already his mind was engaged in
scrutiny of the circumstances in which he was set. He realised fully his
situation. The idealism which had been born with him had met its reward
in a labour herculean at the least, and the infinite drudgery of the
practical issues came in a terrible pressure of conviction to his mind.
The mind did not shrink from any thought of the dangers in which he
would be placed, from any vision of the struggle he must have with
intrigue, and treachery and vileness. In a dim, half-realised way he
felt that honesty and truth would be invincible weapons with a people
who did not know them. They would be embarrassed, if not baffled, by a
formula of life and conduct which they could not understand.

It was not these matters that vexed him now, but the underlying forces
of life set in motion by the blow which killed a fellow-man. This fact
had driven him to an act of redemption unparalleled in its intensity and
scope; but he could not tell--and this was the thought that