ce in life, whether hope is left, or--left out!

* * *

She had been ere now a child and a hero; beneath this blow which struck
at him she changed--she became a woman and a martyr.

And she rode at full speed through the night, as she had done through
the daylight, her eyes glancing all around in the keen instinct of a
trooper, her hand always on the butt of her belt pistol. For she knew
well what the danger was of these lonely, unguarded, untravelled leagues
that yawned in so vast a distance between her and her goal. The Arabs,
beaten, but only rendered furious by defeat, swept down on to those
plains with the old guerilla skill, the old marvellous rapidity. She
knew that with every second shot or steel might send her reeling from
her saddle, that with every moment she might be surrounded by some
desperate band who would spare neither her sex nor her youth. But that
intoxication of peril, the wine-draught she had drunk from her infancy,
was all which sustained her in that race with death. It filled her veins
with their old heat, her heart with its old daring, her nerves with
their old matchless courage: but for it she would have dropped,
heart-sick with terror and despair, ere her errand could be done; under
it she had the coolness, the keenness, the sagacity, the sustained
force, and the supernatural strength of some young hunted animal. They
might slay her so that she left perforce her mission unaccomplished; but
no dread of such a fate had even an instant's power to appal her or
arrest her. While there should be breath in her, she would go on to the
end.

There were eight hours' hard riding before her, at the swiftest pace her
horse could make; and she was already worn by the leagues already
traversed. Although this was nothing new that she did now, yet as time
flew on and she flew with it, ceaselessly, through the dim solitary
barren moonlit land, her brain now and then grew giddy, her heart now
and then stood still with a sudden numbing faintness. She shook the
weakness off her with the resolute scorn for it of her nature, and
succeeded in its banishment. They had put in her hand as she had passed
through the fortress gates a lance with a lantern muffled in Arab
fashion, so that the light was unseen from before, while it streamed
over her herself, to enable her to guide her way if the moon should be
veiled by clouds. With that single starry gleam aslant on a level with
her eyes, she rode thr