h the
scrub towards the water that lay in the hollow beyond the camp. The
wayward songs of the Moorish attendants had died into silence. They
slept, huddled together and shrouded in their djelabes. But their
wailing rapture of those old triumphant days when on the heights above
Granada, beneath the eternal snows, their brethren walked as conquerors,
had been succeeded by the cries of the uneasy beasts that throng the
mountains between Tangier and Tetuan. And Renfrew said to himself that
the jackals kept him from sleeping. He lay still and wondered if Claire
were awake in her tent close by. If so, if her dark eyes were unclouded,
what journeys must her imagination be making! She was so sensitive to
sound of any kind. A cry moved her sometimes with a swift violence that
alarmed those around her. The message of a note of music shut one door
on her soul, opened another, and let her in to strange regions in which
she chose to be lonely.

How amazing it was to think that Claire, with all her serpentine beauty,
all her celebrity, all the legends that clung to her fame, all the wild
caprices of which two worlds had talked for years,--that Claire was
hidden away three feet off, beneath the canvas shield that looked like a
moderate-sized mushroom from the Kasbar on the hill. How amazing to
think she was no longer Claire Duvigne, but Claire Renfrew. Her cheated
audiences sighed in London in which a week ago she was acting. And while
they sighed, she slept in this wild valley of Morocco, or lay awake and
heard the jackals whining among the dwarf palms. And she was his. She
belonged to him. He had the right to hold her--this thin, pale wonder of
night and of fame--in his arms, and to kiss the lips from which came at
will the coo of a dove or the snarl of a tigress. Although Renfrew could
not sleep, he fell into a dream. Indeed, ever since he had married
Claire, a week ago, his life had been a dream. When the goddess suddenly
bends down to the worshipper, and says: "Don't pray to me any more--sit
on my throne by my side!"--the worshipper exchanges one form of devotion
for another, so deep and so different that for a while his ordinary
faculties seem frozen, his life goes in shadowy places. Renfrew was not
a man of deep imagination, but he had enough of the dangerous and dear
quality to make him full of interest in Claire's bonfires of the mind.
He sunned himself in the sparks which flew from her, even as the
phlegmatic man in the pit