ood flowed quicker, he strangled a
sigh in his breast. Here, with death on every hand, with immediate and
fearful peril before him, out of the smell of the desert and the ghostly
glow of the Libyan hills there came a memory--the memory of a mistake he
had made years before with a woman. She had never forgiven him for the
mistake--he knew it at last. He knew that no woman could ever forgive
the blunder he had made--not a blunder of love but a blunder of
self-will and an unmanly, unmannerly conceit. It had nearly wrecked her
life: and he only realised it now, in the moment of clear-seeing which
comes to every being once in a lifetime. Well, it was something to have
seen the mistake at last.

He had come to the sluice-gate. It was impossible to open it without the
fellah on the water-wheel seeing him.

There was another way. He crept close and closer to the wheel. The
breath of the blindfolded buffalo was in his face, he drew himself up
lightly and quickly beside the buffalo--he was making no blunder now.

Suddenly he leapt from behind the buffalo upon the fellah and smothered
his mouth in the white cloth he had brought. There was a moment's
struggle, then, as the wheel went slower and slower, and the patient
buffalo stopped, Wyndham dropped the gagged, but living, fellah into
a trench by the sakkia and, calling to the buffalo, slid over swiftly,
opened the sluice-gate of the channel which fed the house, and closed
that leading to the Arab encampment.

Then he sat down where the fellah had sat, and the sakkia droned its
mystic music over the river, the desert, and the plain. But the buffalo
moved slowly-the fellah's song had been a spur to its travel, as the
camel-driver's song is to the caravan in the waste of sands. Wyndham
hesitated an instant, then, as the first trickle of water entered the
garden of the house where his Gippies and the friendlies were, his voice
rose in the Song of the Sakkia:

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left:
Who will take care of me, if my father dies?
Who will give me water to drink, and the cucumber vine at my door
Turn, O Sakkia!"

If he had but one hour longer there would be enough water for men and
horses for days, twenty jars of water pouring all the time!

Now and again a figure came towards the wheel, but not close enough
to see that the one sluice-gate had been shut and the other opened. A
half-hour passed, an hour, and then the end came.

The ga