sun rises, and I beg you to forgive me if I
leave you for a while, for I must go to give orders as to his death."

Jill's thoughts can be most aptly described as tumultuous, but her
smile was a festival of youth as she watched the Arab, in whom she had
put her trust, walk up the long avenue, stop, and clap his hands.

She could hear no word of the orders given to the servant, who ran from
out a clump of trees to kneel at his master's feet, but she guessed
that it was the engraven emerald ring which passed from one to the
other to be hidden in the servant's turban; and she felt a wave of
absolute satisfaction sweep through her whole being at the thought of
the man's death before the dawn.

At which sensation she mentally shook herself, feeling that the young
tree of her experience, unrestrainedly shooting out in all directions
within the space of a few hours, would require the sharp edge of the
pruning knife if it was to be kept to the merest outline of the shape
common to the ordinary life she had led up to now.

"It is well! He dies before the dawn!" announced the Arab prosaically,
as he came towards this woman who, on the edge of a new life which
might, for all she knew, bring ruin, despair, or even death in its
wake, could so tranquilly talk of the risks she had already encountered
in the course of the first few steps she had taken upon the path she
had chosen to follow.

"And tell me, O! woman, whose courage causes me to marvel, how once
happily escaped from the house of few windows and but one apparent
door, did you find your way to these gates?"

"Oh! that!" said Jill, as she sat with her hands about her knee and her
face upturned to the moon, which, throwing a deep shadow from the hat
brim across the upper part of her face, made of the deep eyes a
mystery, and a delirious invitation of the red mouth. "Amongst other
till now useless accomplishments, I have learned to guide myself by the
stars, though I'm positive they move over here. I had noticed that big
one there, which we haven't got in England, that very big sparkling
one, hung over the quarter in which the waiting-maid told me lay your
house."

"Yes!" replied the man who, though he knew the West so well, was
secretly wondering at the trait in a character which allowed a _woman_,
on the edge of something unknown, fraught, perhaps, with every kind of
danger, to talk unconcernedly of hotels, face creams, blue doors, and
stars. "That is the Star of H