egan to play cards in a cloud of keef. Claire was fanning herself
slowly with an enormous Spanish fan in which all gay colours met. She
still looked very tired. The shuffle of the descending mules died away
down the mountain, and a silence, through which the butterflies flitted,
fell round them.

"Is this journey too much for you, Claire?" Renfrew asked.

"No. I can rehearse for six hours in London, surely I can ride for six
here."

"But you look tired."

"Because, as I told you, I slept too much last night."

"What does that mean?"

She stretched herself on the rug with the easy grace of a woman who has
trained her body to carry to the eyes of others, as a message, all the
moods of passion and of peace. Then she leaned her cheek on her hand.

"In the darkness of the tent, Desmond, I slept and did not know it. I
believed that I lay awake. I thought I still could hear the jackals, and
the stamping of the mules. But, really, I slept."

"How do you know that?"

"Because of what I am going to tell you. The wind blew about the canvas
door, and when it bulged outwards I could see on each side of it a tiny
section of the night outside, a bit of a bush, blades of short grass
moving, a ray of the moon, the slinking shadow of one of the dogs from
the village."

"Yes."

"Presently there came, I thought, a stronger gust than usual. It tore
the canvas flap from the pegs, and the whole thing blew up, leaving the
entrance quite open. Then it blew down again. It was only up for a
minute. During that minute I had seen that a very tall man was standing
outside the tent."

"One of the soldiers."

"If I had been awake it might have been."

"You mean that all this was a dream?"

"I mean that I slept last night, and that I wish I hadn't."

She turned her great eyes on Renfrew, holding the red, green, and yellow
fan so that it concealed the lower part of her face. And he looked at
her, staring at him like some tragic stranger above the rampart of an
unknown city, and wondered whether she was acting to him in the sun. On
the forefinger of the hand that held up the fan a huge black pearl
perched in a circle of gold. Renfrew had often noticed it on the stage,
when Claire lifted the silver dagger to kill the man who loved her in
the play.

"The door of your tent was securely closed when I got up and came out
this morning," he said.

"Oh, yes."

She spoke with the utmost indifference. Then she added more sharply:--

"De