Book the Fourth: THE PASSING (continued 3)

"I remember. Bid the messenger of the Samaritan divineress come hither!" The long lashes veil the Emir's grey eyes, and as he speaks with languid pauses between the words, he hears the measure of that well-known refrain in the throbbing of his arteries and the beating of his heart: "Take away the dishes and send her up here. Or—" There is a whiff of myrrh and sandal as the tall slight figure in, its rustling silken garments rises from the divan: "Here, from the window, point her out to me!"

"O Prince, behold the daughter of Sheitan! dancing and singing to the camel-men and horse-boys in the haush below."

The tall figure of the Emir steps out on the balcony as a guffaw of coarse merriment comes up from the courtyard borne on a stronger wave of stinks.

X

A circle of Fellah grooms and Arab camel-men, coarse-mouthed, evil-eyed, old in the ways of vice—are gathered about a little creature in the dingy blue print robe, yellow-white outer-robe of sheeting and coarse double veil of the Fellaha. To the majority of these Ummshni is known, not so to the others; who crowd round, eager to taste the joy of baiting the veiled woman who has ventured alone into the crowded court of the Khan.

"Hail, O Beauty, in search of a lover!" jests a squint-eyed Arab. "Couldst thou not pay an old woman to tout for thy customers? Has business been so bad that thou art driven forth under the eye of daylight? Nay then, show thy face for a foretaste of pleasure. Insh'allah!—unless thou art ugly as a daughter of the Jinniyeh, here is Abu Mulâd the Tuareg camel-man, ready and willing to take thee on!"

"The Daughters of the Jinniyeh have legs shaggy with hair, and not seldom one eye in the middle of the forehead," squeals a scullion, as Abu Mulâd, a huge and hideous Tuareg from Central Sahara, whose face, arms and legs are dyed with indigo, whose back hair is plaited in tails with straw, and whose top locks are hogged like a cob's mane under the black tribal head-cloth, is thrust into the forefront of the circle by a dozen officious hands. "While this moon's husband fell down dead for sheer joy when his bride was first unveiled to him. Is it not the sheer truth, O Bestower of Delights?"

"Verily thou dost not lie, for once, O Kasib the scullion!" says a thin but audible voice from behind the close-drawn veil. "Wilt thou risk the same fate, O Abu Mulâd the Tuareg? Then—then put forth thine hand! ... Or—shall I save thee the trouble? See then the face that killed a man upon his wedding-night!"

With a thin, shrill cackle of derisive laughter, she draws the screen of coarse towelling. Abu Mulâd stares, grimaces behind the strip of black cloth covering his mouth, curses and spits copiously.... While the little active figure, galvanised into sudden activity, revolves before him in an impish dance, chanting to a weird, unholy tune, words in a strange, unknown tongue:—

There is something so gnome-like about the little capering figure, revolving lightly as a withered leaf, or an eddy of Desert sand, upon the unclean litter of the courtyard of the Khan, that—and there is not one man of all the throng who does not believe in witchcraft—even those who know Ummshni best, quail at the possibility of falling under some evil spell, blasting in its effect upon the body as upon the soul.

Kasib the scullion claps his hand before his mouth, as do a dozen others, invoking the Protection. But Abu Mulâd is of the type of man that, ordinarily slow, dilatory and lumpish as a buffalo, is rendered tigerish by fear. He shakes in his hide sandals and bleaches under his indigo mask as he splutters through the V-shaped gap between his filed front teeth:

"Be thou accursed, thou one-eyed sorceress! abominable ghoul, conceiver by the seed of devils! Insha'llah! this good blade of mine shall purge thee of thine evil blood!"

Not a man puts out his hand to save the woman, as the Tuareg leaps upon her, grasps her frail shoulder, and the curved iron knife flashes out, when a sharp clear voice, with the unmistakable ring of authority in it, arrests the lifted hand.

"Shwai!"

The whites of eager eyes roll, as the dark, excited faces are lifted to the balcony where stands the Emir Fadl Anga. Now his sharp, authoritative voice rings out again:

"Release the woman and bid her come up hither. Who shows her violence will reckon with me!"

The Tuareg's heavy blue fingers fall from the slender, bruised shoulder. Ummshni mutely salaams to the imperious Presence above, and moves with her customary, artificial limp to the outer staircase leading to the balcony, as the crowd of idlers, frustrated of the pleasant thrill that is born of the sight of bloodshed, disperse to their various quarters.

Imperiously beckoning the woman to make haste, the Emir moves back into the room, and presently the shadow of the little feminine figure is cast across the balcony and the three-inch high window-sill, that is grooved to receive the heavy shutter that closes the room at night....

With a strange premonitory thrill, Yaill speaks to the little creature:

"Enter without fear, O Mother of Ugliness!" He goes on as her fragile, dusky arms curve out, the hands touch the veiled brow in the Eastern salutation from an inferior, and noiselessly as a moth she flits into the room: "And without fear—for here we are in privacy—tell me who taught thee that song?"

"O Saiyid!" How faint and whispering a voice is hers.... "I learned the song from a big man—-a soldier of the Army of Ingiltarra—who sat on a sack of biscuits after Sheria, and hummed while the Sons of the Desert made the Prayer of Afternoon."

"Where is the man to be found?"

"Saiyid, he lies in hiding in a tomb upon Mount Ebal, having been lamed in leaping from a landing aëroplane. His liver is charred with anger at so untoward an accident. Strong is his brain to help thee plan, and strong as iron are his hands—that could choke the life out of an enemy's throat—even as a child twists a rotten cucumber. But he is lame!" Yaill marks the falling note of anguished pity in the voice. "He can but limp upon a stick, he cannot leap or run...."

"Tell him from me.... Stay! ... Tell me first how thou didst encounter him?"

"Sir," Ah, the woman knows too much, she is actually speaking English, "Sir, to me, a woman of many sorrows, secretly dwelling in that desolate place of which I speak, he came as a stranger seeking succour. Then, by the Will of the Most High, was discovered between us kinship: the bond of religion, the call of race, and the unbreakable tie of blood."

"Madam—"

"Give me not that title. I am no man's wife!"

"Then, Miss Hazel—"

"Chut! Call me only Ummshni." A black eye sparkles at Yaill from between her veils and a little finger, slender and supple as a lizard's tail, signs to him to beware. "I heard a footstep overhead, but now!" the thin voice whispers, reverting to Arabic, "And it did not pass on, and see there—that hole!"

With an upward gesture of her supple hand she barely indicates the whitewashed ceiling, in which there is certainly a hole, rat-gnawed, or made by human hands for spying purposes—and reaching to the surface of the flat mud roof above.

"O Ummshni, there is a hole indeed, cleverly made for eavesdropping, but the man who keeps guard above it is a follower of mine. Stay—thou shalt prove it so!" Fadl Anga whistles, shrill and sharp, the call of the pigeon-master; and there is a rap on the roof above, and an answering, echoing call. "Now take a message for thy man. Tell him from me, that since by Fate he is doomed to be out of the adventure—"

"Give me a message worded in some other way. I will not wound him so!" There is sensitive pride in the thin, whispering voice. "And first let me discharge mine errand. Here are the letters I spoke of in the song."

"Give, then," says the Emir briefly....

She draws from beneath her coarse white outer robe John's square of sewn parchment-paper, inked with the signs of the Zodiac, touches with it her veiled forehead, and offers it in both her outstretched palms.

"The letters are stitched within, I was to tell thee. And that one of them comes from the hand of her—who is dearest to thee of all!"

A great wave of emotion goes through Yaill, as he takes the inky double square of soiled parchment-paper. His hand trembles for a moment, and there is a dimness before his eyes.

"Thank—"

"Do not thank me, sir," the little creature quietly says in her Paris-learned English, "I acted in obedience. Shall I not carry out the orders of him who is Head of my House? Now give me the message to carry to John Hazaël in the Mountain, for at dark I have business that brings me back to this town."

"Shall I write, Miss Hazel, or shall you remember?"

"It will be safest not to write, and I shall not forget. Tell me in English, time and all.... It will be clearer for John Hazaël, I being commanded to repeat your very words."

"Then tell John Hazel from Edward Yaill that I have received the packet, and that as earnestly as ever man thanked man, I thank him for what he has done! To-night, between twelve-thirty and two o'clock—European time—we break into the Wired Enclosure. We have learned of an easy way to get in; and except for one man, who cannot be dealt with, I think we can dispose of the guards."

"To-night between half-past twelve—no! ... Twelve-thirty and two o'clock you break into the Wired Enclosure, having learned of an easy way to get in...." The tone is studiously calm, but the throbbing of her heart shakes her. "Is that all, or is there more to tell? ..."

"There is a tunnel running from the wooden hut that was used as a mess-room by the English officers. Do you follow? It begins under the bed that is in the hut, and running eastward, passes under the broken cart that stands near the side of the road. Five paces from the sentry-box of the man we cannot deal with—the Darweesh who neither drinks wine nor smokes."

"Nay. But it may be—" The talk has swung back to Arabic, and the voice that is thin and soft as a trickling rivulet of hill-water, sounds as though Ummshni's hidden mouth were smiling behind her veil. "It may be that Ishak Baba the Darweesh, who drinks no wine nor tobacco, and cannot be drugged into blindness—hath no strength to refrain his lips from the offered goblet of love?"

"Ah! So there is a weak place in his priestly garment, that," Yaill remembers something the Shaykh Gôhar has said, "that the little fingers of a woman might widen to a hole?"

"Verily, O Emir! To-night when the Dark comes, Ishak Baba going on guard at sunset—it is a pact twixt him and me, that I, Ummshni, may feed the—the English prisoner, if—if a shameless woman of the Bazâr, a gipsy whom Ishak Baba loves—visits the Baba in his sentry-box. I, Ummshni, keeping watch the while."

"Isht! (Bravo!) O woman of a thousand! Hast thou carried the assignation to the gipsy courtesan?"

"Nay, not yet."

"Then, do not carry it!" The Emir's grey eyes gleam, under the green silk kuffiyeh that drapes his tarbûsh, and the thin lips under the henna-dyed beard curve into a smile that shows his white, rather irregular teeth. "One of my men will keep the love-tryst, walking with a mincing, womanly carriage—and swathed in the white izar. Was the gipsy not to pass the Baba on his beat, dropping an almond or a flower, and before he wheeled about, slip into the sentry-box? Dost thou nod? Ay, I well thought thou didst, it is an ancient game!"

The Emir's white teeth gleam in his red-dyed beard, and Ummshni gives her little mirthless titter.

"As my lord says, the game is old, but while Earth spins between the Poles it will not lack for players. One thing there is to ask...." The voice falters and the little figure trembles. "Thy man ... He will not kill the posta?"

"Nay. Do not tremble. He will only gag him well, and bind."

She gives a small sigh of relief.

"There will be the green rods for him, the luckless one! when the prisoner's escape is discovered."

The Emir's thin eyebrows mount in his bronzed forehead. He says in his languid, high-bred tones:

"So there be an escape to find out, I am even content that he should taste the asayisi. I do not love Turks."

"Nor I, Saiyid! But—" and another wave of shuddering goes over the little shrouded figure: "since the ninefold curse of War fell upon this my unhappy country, I have seen such rivers of blood flow—"

"O lady, the whole world bleeds; nor shall its wounds know stanching until the enemies of Peace are brought low. They are the Turk and the German, and yet another who wears the skin of many races, and plots evil in many tongues. He works underground, and flies by night, and does not show his face in sunshine; but when his hour comes, he will be revealed! Russia has the disease of him—and Ireland is rotten with him!—and in India and the Far East the papers that bear his teachings are cast abroad, and carried on the winds, and shower down like the falling leaves."

"And here. Even in this town—"

The black eye sparkles between the folds of coarse towelling, and the grey eyes lighten in an answering look.

"So! ... Thou couldst tell a tale—"

"Saiyid." The eye-gleam is hidden in the folds, the tone is humbly deprecating. "I am only Ummshni. Who looks over his shoulder when a thing so despicable limps by with her basket or sharbi?"

"I understand. Now, attend. Tell your John Hazel that we four men—I with my two Bedwân and Father Forbis, ride out of Shechem before dawn, having the password and making the pretext, that a carrier-pigeon being to fly for Mecca at daybreak, we mean to launch her from the Mount. There is a good chance that—Shechem being full of strangers—the fourth mounted man of us shall pass unobserved. But, in any event, for us there is no turning. Dost thou understand?"

The lean sunburned hand touches the butt of one of the Emir's silver and ivory-mounted revolvers.

"O Saiyid, I understand!"

"Good. Tell John Hazel to wait for us a mile west of Shechem, where the Road of the Wady Azzun—going to Jaffa, turns southward through a deep defile among the hills. Is that clearly understood, or shall I repeat it?"

"It is understood, and John Hazaël will meet thee, where the road of the Wady Azzun, going to Jaffa, turns southward through the defile among the hills."

"Can he, being so lame? ..."

"He can if I say he can. I will see to it!"

"Then we will leave it so. Near the mouth of the defile, is a Turkish Army Service motor-lorry. It broke down there yesterday and it is there to-day. Let Hazel wait in the shadow of it, for the sound of our horses. If we can get a spare horse we will bring it. If not, one of those we ride will have to carry two men. For Hazel is our partner in the adventure. We are not going to leave him in a hole!"

"I hear, O Saiyid! and I shall not forget. By the broken Turkish lorry where the road turns south, running between the walls of the defile.... It is for Jaffa that you ride?"

"For Jaffa, where the British are.... Naturally."

Nationality unconsciously asserts itself in the tone. She answers in her whispering accents.

"There are British, five miles nearer here than Jaffa, striking north from the Cross-Roads of Gilgal—over the levels, and again west at Nebi Karen.... For there is the Tower of Kir Saba, and Kir Saba is the Headquarters of—what you call—a Mounted Brigade.... Not of soldiers from England—but British of the Dominions—and yet not Australians, though looking like them.... Dark, stern-faced men with crimson bands and little green tufts on their soft brown hats—riding little, thick-necked, active horses, sitting not loosely as does the Arab, but close, as though horse and rider were one."

"They are New Zealand Mounted Rifles. You have certainly a gift for detail, Miss Hazel."

The grey eyes of the Emir lighten appreciatively under the Hajj's green turban. The little veiled creature, as unmoved by his praise as she was by the Tuareg's insult, goes on with what she has to say:

"'Anzacs,' that is their name. And since yesterday their Headquarters is Kir Saba, whose Tower stands north from the Cross-Roads two miles upon the slope of the hills. The Turks and Germans drove their trenches through the vineyards and gardens, but, though they emptied the vaults, and wine-cellars, and broke the refrigerating plant, they did not cut down the orchards and olive-groves that stretch for miles over the Hills. They were wire-fenced and gated in the time of Eli Hazaël. Lest the wire should not have been cut, or the locks of the gates broken,—I will place in thy charge this key that I have here."

She is holding out to Yaill a clumsy metal spatula, evidently the work of an Eastern hand.

"There are other keys upon the ring," she shows the slip-ring of copper wire on which some smaller metal spatulas are strung. "They are the keys of the habitable rooms that are on the Tower ground-floor. We lived there part of every year, during the Spring and vintage. Turks having been there—" the slight inflection given to the word conveys a contempt that is boundless; "the rooms may contain nothing that is fit for usage; yet were it otherwise, all is at the service of my lord."

"You are very kind!" Yaill says, more than a little awkwardly, for one to whom the sonorous speech and stately bearing of the Bedwân are second nature by now.

"By the Saiyid's leave," again Yaill has the impression that the hidden mouth smiles coldly, "I speak of another—to whom the Tower belongs."

"Ah, yes, of course."

Yaill is suddenly switched on to a fact he has forgotten:

"Of course, the Tower of Kir Saba and the land about it, have been for many generations the property of the Forbis family. And Father Julian is the only living male heir. But how do you know?"

There is pride in the low voice that answers:

"Saiyid, though but a woman, I am of the race of Hazaël. For sixteen hundred years and more our men have been Keepers of the Tower and Guardians of the Shrine. Thou wilt deliver the keys to my lord? It is a promise?"

"It is a sacred promise. Pardon that I forgot!"

"Now I go back to carry thy words to John Hazaël on Mount Ebal. Then I return to Shechem. At sunset Abu Ishak goes on guard, at the end of the Wired Enclosure where the wooden hut is, and when it is dark, I feed the prisoner."

"Is it wise to risk so much for that?"

"Being a man," the little voice is very cold, "the Saiyid speaks man-fashion. Being a woman, descended from Her who is the Mother of all men save Adam, I speak after the manner of my sex. How shall the lord of Kir Saba ride for life—and over the hill-roads—if he be fainting? Will he not sit the saddle better if he be strengthened with broth and wine?"

"O daughter of our Mother Eve, wise art thou, and full of forethought! One thing before we part. What time shall the gipsy-woman come to the sentry? It shall be for thee to say!"

She thinks an instant, then says:

"When the boruzan of the guard sounds his bugle, and the lights of the camp are darkened, let her come, stepping softly, and pass the Darweesh on his beat—dropping a white flower, or a piece of white paper—and then slip swiftly as a snake, or a lizard, into the sentry-box. When the Baba returns—"

"In the hope of finding waiting—the only one of the Forbidden Things he hath not power to forego—he will kiss a gag of oiled camel-hide, smooth and tight-fitting and greasy, instead of his gipsy's hot, painted mouth. She will come when they sound 'Lights Out' at the camp of the Wired Enclosure.... And so, good-bye, Miss Hazel," says the Emir Fadl Anga, and his sorrowful grey eyes are kindly as they rest on the little shape. "Forgive me for asking the question, but under the circumstances—seeing that we clear out of here to-night—what is to become of you? ..."

"Of me? ..."

She gives her queer, rustling laugh, and by the sound of it he knows himself in the presence of a despair that is greater, because more hopeless than his own.

"What becomes of the Dust when the puff of wind hath passed over? Does it not settle down again—to be trodden underfoot by men?"

"But," Yaill feels something like awe of her, so small, so desolate, so set apart, enfolded in her tragic sorrow, "at least, in case of trouble at the gates to-night, you had better let me give you the pass."

"I am Ummshni.... I need no pass! ... Again I am like the Dust in this—that when men tread me underfoot I am carried on their sandals, wherever I would go. Farewell, O Saiyid! May the Most High preserve you and your companions—and grant my lord deliverance by your brave hands, to-night!"

And she is gone, and Edward Yaill takes a dagger from his girdle, and rips open the inky, stitched-up double square of tough parchment note.

Two letters tumble out of it into his eager fingers. One is in the familiar, beloved script of Katharine Forbis, the other—the buff envelope, blurred with postmarks, patched with stamps and scrawled with re-addresses he thrusts carelessly into a pocket within his silk kaftan.

One shivers, contemplating the loss of that wonderful buff envelope, and the consequent slip between the cup and the lip. But Yaill has no thought but this! To him, on the eve of the Great Adventure, has come a God-speed message from his love....

"My Man of all the Men that walk this world!" she cries to him. "My full heart lies between your darling hands to-night. And your dear, dear letter—O Edward! I have it close to me. It lies where my own love's head rested when we said 'Good-bye.' You remember that sweet, sad parting in the chapel at Kerr's Arbour? ... I shall never smell violets again, or put on my mother's black lace veil to wear to Communion, without going back in memory to that day ..."

It is a long letter, written all over eight pages, and running along the edges of the filled sheets. Love and solicitude and anxious wistful yearning, overflow into the smallest corners, curling and flourishing like tendrils of the vine. It is not a high-browed letter, nor even a passionate one, though pure womanly passion throbs through it from beginning to end. It is Katharine in her fullest expression—and than Katharine, Edward Yaill, her lover,—asks nothing better for this world and for the next.

"Dearest," it ends, "John Hazel has promised to get this letter through to you, and the other that I have written for Julian,—and yet another that was sent to Kerr's Arbour for you. How strange that at the parting of our ways, so true a friend should have risen up to help us. With you I feel—more strongly than I can say here—that this man is linked with my Fate! With 'our' fate, I would once have said—but must not now, Edward. Ah, though I do not speak or write thus, I always think in the plural, dear! ...

"My own, though you make so little of it, you are in danger. An accent misplaced, an unguarded gesture—a twitch of a muscle—might bring you Death. If it add to your peril to give you this—John Hazel has my authority to destroy it, this letter that I have kissed where your dear, dear hands should touch! Julian's Rosary and your bit of asphodel I keep where I can feel them, as I go about my business of driving cars in Egypt for our Red Cross. Thank God, I have lots to do! And I do it, as well as I can, with both of you tugging at my heartstrings,—lie down to sleep with a prayer for you on my lips—wake in the night, crying for joy, because I have dreamed that you are safe, and we are happy as we used to be. And rise to another day of anxiety and loneliness....

Oh, well! it can't go on for ever! Even suspense like this must come to an end. God keep you both, my Precious Ones! and bring you back safely to—

"Your loving, faithful, anxious, "KATHARINE."

Yaill reads the letter three times and kisses it lingeringly. Then he puts it carefully away. With certain other documents, maps and diagrams of fortified places, tracings on silk tissue-paper, and two or three other letters in Sanscrit and Arabic, in a small flat case of tough glass, double, and metal-jointed; covered with green gazelle-leather, stamped with an Eastern design. The flat paper-case closes hermetically; and a twirl of a stop-screw liberates the acid contained in a reservoir at the top. Thus, its contents may be destroyed,—or rendered completely illegible, at the will of the agent who carries the case....

At the last moment Yaill remembers the buff envelope, brings it out, turns it over and sniffs at it.... It exhales no cheap and violent perfume, displays no gaudy monogram.... The handwriting, large, flourishing and square, is quite unknown to him, and yet—as it lies under his incurious eyes, the image of his wife, Lucy Yaill—once Burtonshaw—is flashed upon his brain.

He will not open the buff envelope just now.... The thing with its English superscription, being dangerous to carry, he puts it away with the other papers in the glass-lined case, one twirl of whose lever-screw can blot out words, penned in the sprawling hand, that mean Hope renewed, Happiness restored, Union with the woman so faithfully loved, a blessed possibility—granted that Katharine's tender prayers for her beloved's protection and safety are heard, and answered soon....

XI

A huge Arab, mounted on a very little ass, ambling along the stony roads while a woman trudges in the dust behind him, is so common a spectacle in Palestine as to occasion no remark. Were the positions reversed,—did the woman ride the donkey and the man tramp after, then by so unprecedented a breach of etiquette, popular comment would naturally be provoked.

After the fashion indicated above, Ummshni, conjuring the little beast from some source unknown, has conveyed her man to Fadl Anga's appointed meeting-place, a mile west of Shechem, where the road of the Wady Azzun, switchbacking down to Jaffa—or more properly Gilgal—turns southward, running down a steep-sided defile among the hills. There, where the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry stands by the roadside, she has left him, taking with her a cherished asset he has carried hidden about him, in the shape of a pair of insulated wire-cutters. Her parting words still sound in his ears:

"Thou art the Head of our House, my cousin. Bless me before I go! ..."

Now John tingles with a scalding sense of her worth, and his own unworthiness, as he remembers how he put his heavy hand on the small veiled head, and muttered some incoherent words. Then she turned, and went from him so quietly that he has barely realised the risk that she is taking. Now that she has gone, it comes sharply home to him, and salt stinging moisture gathers under his eyelids, and a lump is in his throat.

The little donkey, hobbled by Ummshni before she went, to prevent its straying, grazes contentedly by the roadside, where rich green weeds, and grass and brake, and clumps of late-flowering asphodel betray the presence of moisture in the soil....

The sides of the hill-pass opening here, are chocolate-brown where the soil shows bare, as those of any cliff at home in Devon or Somerset, and trickling with little streams, thick-fringed with maidenhair.... Snapdragons of many hues, cyclamen white, and violet, and pink, spring in the crannies of the rocks, with the purple amaryllis, and a smell suggesting violets is sweet upon the air.

It is close upon the hour of sunset now. There is a great view here, from the top of the stiff up-gradient that climbs up from Shechem to plunge in a long series of downward curves, westward towards Jaffa, until, Gilgal reached—it turns at an acute southward angle and leaps the Cana Road. Nobody comes, though Turkish cavalry patrol the wadys at irregular intervals, and there are outposts with machine guns among the hills. Save for the thudding of those restless guns south-west and east, it would be even sweet and peaceful. For the air is divinely spiced with that rare perfume that is so like the smell of violets; the orange-winged Syrian blackbird pipes out his good-night song; and every thorn, or wild-olive, or mulberry-tree of all that mantle the sides of the defile, seems to accommodate its pair of bulbuls, warbling and jug-jugging in the very rage of ecstasy—sometimes breaking off to mew—after the provoking habit of nightingales. And John Hazel lights another strong Arab cigarette, swings himself to the driver's seat of the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry, and for a brief space, listens and smokes, and thinks....

He recalls the great experiences of War, forgetting War's miseries and discomforts. The social joys of the camp-fire, the long, confidential talks of the bivouac, the short, hard hand-grip pals exchange before going into action; the parting kiss that a soldier may set on the lips of a dead or dying friend. Men have seen men's souls face to face in the midst of hideous slaughter—in the pauses between horrible explosions—and until the heavens are rolled up as a scroll, and the sea is dry from shore to shore—and the Earth stops spinning between her poles, they will not forget these things.... Perhaps not even then....

And then John's thought goes back, as it has not done for long, to the thriving Firm of Dannahill, Lee-Levyson and Hazel, Insurance Brokers, of London City; and Beryl Lee-Levyson, John's former love—Muriel, Beryl's sister, and his brother Maurice—now piloting a Handley-Page bombing 'plane on the Western Front, Old Mendel, and Miss Birdie Bright, pass in imagined rotation over a stage, oddly backed by a composite drop, in part representing the Underwriting Room at Lloyds, the Office in Cornhill, and John's bedroom at Campden Hill....

Dannahill, still haggard from the shock of his grandson's death, (the wire had only come from the War Office that September morning) and Lee-Levyson and Copples the Senior Clerk, are shaking the Junior Partner's hands, as he comes out of his stuffy little office with his working coat in a brown paper parcel, containing a lot of odds and ends, some pipes, and Beryl's tinted photograph in a flamboyant silver frame. John is in a full suit of pink-striped silk pyjamas, and there too is Mrs. Hazel, John's mother, handsome in her pale blue crêpe dressing-gown, with her still abundant auburn hair in a thick plait down her back. To her John hears himself saying in his acquired British accent:

"Anyway, if the Pater was a Syrian Jew, your governor was British enough, anyway! Symes sounds like a good old English name."

And the answer comes like a douche of cold water on his secret hopes—like a crunch on the pill deftly concealed in the middle of a spoonful of jelly:

"That was why your grandmother adopted it. After your grandfather's death, of course. His name was Simonoff.... A Russian Jew from Moscow...."

The chill of the cold water, the bitterness of the pill. How John Hazel has shivered at the one and grimaced over the other. Some shock! to learn that between the Jew of Palestine and the Jew of Greater Russia he has been wrought all Jewish. That not one globule of British blood mingles with the strong Semitic tide that gallops through his veins....

And now—though his big body sits still and smokes, his spirit is abroad to-night on these hills of Samaria. He snuffs the sweet wild November breeze with wide, distended nostrils, and shows his big white teeth in a silent laugh.

This Hither Asian land of Syria.... How he has despised and belittled it—this Garden of Miracles from whose teeming soil—burrowed by a nation of cave-dwellers and idol-worshippers, and tracked by the footprints of nomadic shepherds—prophets, sages, seers, philosophers, poets, musicians, artists, architects—leaped into birth at the Divine Bidding, while as yet the world was a jungle of ferocious human beasts.... This Palestine, no bigger than the County of Middlesex, in Religion, History, Science, Law, hygiene and moral teaching—has she not ever led the way and pointed to the zenith? What if her star, after long eclipse, should now be in the ascendant? Strange, strange, if after all the centuries of war, exile and oppression, Christian hands are to give back Palestine to the Jews! ...

He hugs himself, muttering:

"A hell of a country to get hold of you, and no mistake about it. But she is IT, this little old Palestine! She's got it in her to whack the globe—given the men and the money. I'm one of her men.... I've got some money. And it's going to be spent with lots more to set her going again. Golden blood pumped into her veins to set her heart beating—and make her buried splendours, her Temple with its golden dome, her matchless Holy City—her towns, and gardens, and hippodromes and palaces jump out of her yellow soil as quick as mustard-and-cress." He chuckles. "I'm a bit potty! ... 'Fey,' a Scotchman'd call it.... I feel as if all my Big Old Men—those dead old Hazaëls—right away down from the Kings of Damascus who laid siege to Ahab, King of Israel, and afterwards joined up with him against the Assyrians!—were alive and swarming over these hills of Samaria to-night...."

Perhaps the man, in his normal state, is oblivious of the postscript he supplied to the story of the inscription on the tablet. He may not know the blood of the Hazaëls is tinctured with the Israelite blood of Istâr the Princess, daughter of Jezebel of Tyre and Ahab of Samaria. Half a mile north of where he sits on the lorry,—parallel with the road to Gilgal, runs the great seaward-going road of the Wady-es Sha'ir, forking off at Anebta, past the Watch Tower hill of Omri, to Carmel and the sea.

From her nest of purple cushions in the high balcony-window of her ivory palace at Samaria, Jezebel, Ahab's Queen, daughter of King Ethbal of Sidon, looked—when her people's god, red as though dyed with the blood of the murdered prophets—was blotted out of sight by the rising curve of the earth.... Famine withered the rainless land, and beasts and men were perishing, as the Prophet of the Most High lay prostrate on the summit of Mount Carmel, pressing his face against the sod....

"And while he turned himself this way and that," as a worm might writhe in anguish, the little cloud rose out of the sea. And the troubler of Israel rose up and sent word to King Ahab:

"Prepare thy chariot and go down, lest the rain prevent thee!"

Over this broad Road of the Wady-es Sha'ir, the fleet horses of Ahab's jewelled ivory chariot thundered, as "the heavens grew dark with clouds and wind, and there fell a great rain." And the King raced down to Samaria before the pelting storm, while the lean prophet, the swift Hound of God, scoured fleetly on before....

And Elias, being threatened with the vengeance of Jezebel, because he had killed the priests of her golden temple of Baal Zebub, fled south to Beersheba, and being miraculously fed, journeyed to Horeb, and lived in a cave. And after the Vision on the Mountain, returned by the Divine Command through the desert to Damascus, and anointed Hazaël of Damascus to be King of Syria....

Now John, lineal descendant of the race,—inhales the rank smoke of his Arab cigarette, and pursues his train of thought. Sitting on the broken-down Turkish motor-lorry, with knees drawn up to his long chin, and his long arms hugging them; with his Arab head-cloth pushed awry, and prickly burrs tangled in his coarse black hair, that is powdered with limestone-dust like his mahogany skin—the huge man with the great nose and the fierce black eyes that blaze under their bushy, knotted eyebrows, is an awesome spectacle—having much more in common with the lean and dusty Prophet than with his own remote ancestor the Baal-worshipping King.

He is engaged, as he sits there, in a death-struggle with the strongest and most ruthlessly selfish of all human passions. That smell of violets brings Katharine back—dwarfing as great artists will—every other player on the stage of his mental theatre. He sees her on a certain February day, standing in the chintz-hung drawing-room looking on the terrace at Kerr's Arbour, with a bunch of greenhouse violets in her beloved hand....

"I was going to take him these.... Perhaps you would like to?" she had said, giving the violets to John.... Then he followed her up the little aisle of the chapel, and stood with her beside the General's long coffin, looking down at the grand old face, and the rigid clasped hands....

"Father, dear, this is a friend of ours, whom you have wished to see!"

Again he hears her, speaking as though the old man were not dead but in a quiet slumber. She touched his hand in showing him how to place the violets under the rigid fingers, that held a Crucifix and had a Rosary threaded between....

On that first day she seemed to John, older, graver, sterner than afterwards, when Edward Yaill came upon the scene. He remembers how their eyes met, and she kindled into beauty. He recalls his brief, stern interview with Yaill, and that parting "Carry on...."

He conjures up the Funeral, and Katharine veiled and draped in black—offering him in a silver shell some earth from Palestine to sprinkle on the coffin. He recalls her summoning telegram, and the finding of the khaki kit of the "Missing British Officer" hidden away in the fox-earth in the wood. He glows again with joy as she comes to greet him at the Hospital, beautiful, strong and womanly, in her uniform of cool white drill. He welcomes her to the cradle-house of her Roman race, the House of Philoremus Fabius, on the ancient Street of the Four Winds, now lost in the Rue el Farad. Again he waits for her outside the Chapel of the Shrine, again they sit on the granite seat under the moss-cup oak. And once more he thrills exquisitely at the velvet touch of her warm, sweet mouth upon his clumsy hand.

It was a cruel thing to do, but she had no thought of coquetry. He knows that the kiss was a belated tribute from a woman of her race, to the last male Hazaël but one. That she looked past the recipient of the kiss to the huge, swart, bearded ancestor, who first held the onyx ring in trust, guarded the Title Deeds, and preserved the house at Alexandria—and the Tower of Kir Saba in Palestine, to be handed down, a sacred charge—by his children's children, and their children, down to the present day.... A tribute of gratitude and respect, that kiss, and nothing further. But it was set by a woman's mouth upon the hand of a man....

He knows that there is no hope for him, this ungainly worshipper of Katharine, even though her lover should never be free to marry her—though the tie that binds Yaill to Lucy Burtonshaw should endure for both their lives. He, John, has hated Yaill with the virile strength of jealousy. He has conquered that baseness in himself.... He hates the man no more.... He has risked and borne much to carry Yaill her letter. He has been even warmed and heartened by his enemy's gratitude:

"Tell him that I have received the packet, and that as earnestly as man ever thanked man, I thank him for what he has done! ..."

But even with Yaill's message fresh in mind, John is not cured of hoping. He hopes—and sets his huge foot upon the neck of his hope—while yearning over it as a man may yearn over his first-born. For this that has come to him is the knowledge of true Love, and even as Jacob in old days wrestled with the Angel,—John Hazel strives with his masterful, bright-winged passion—not trying to detain Love, but rather to compel Love, by force of thews, to go....

The blood-red sunset glorifies the West, fills the defile from cliff to cliff, and now smoulders out in amber and jade-green, peacock blue and rose-madder. Grey twilight comes—and the birds are still, as a giant owl flies over, and sinks, as a shadow sinks, amongst the shadowy trees.... No one draws near. The cavalry patrols of the Turk are oddly infrequent on this particular Shechem end of the Jaffa-going road....

John gets up and shakes his dreams and hopes and memories from him, as a swimmer emerging from a sluggish stream might shake off clinging weeds. His hopes are scarcely weeds. Rather are they trails of blossoming lotus or water-lily. But lilies or weeds, they hamper. And there is work to do.

He stretches himself, shakes his giant frame, pitches away the stump of his cigarette—gets down from the driver's seat, climbs into the body of the lorry and proceeds to inspect the boxes that form its load. They are heavy wooden cases roughly dovetailed together, painted a dirty stone-blue and grossly daubed with the Crescent and Star in bright vermilion paint. They are branded with the initials of the Turkish A.S.C., carry the stamp of the shell-factory at Makrikeui, and belong to the 2nd battalion of the 4th Infantry Regiment, (Headquarters Salonika) of the IIIrd Ottoman Ordu.

John thinks it would be as well to have a look inside a few of those blue boxes, with the assistance of a spanner, and his pocket electric torch. He looks about for a spanner and presently finds one in the tool-box aft of the driver's seat. It is a large spanner of good steel, and—in the hands of John Hazel—makes a most efficient substitute for the key of the Turkish lock. The nails draw, the wood splinters, the lid is lifted.... The box—instead of being full of packets of Mauser cartridges, proves to be packed with metal spheres the size of biggish cricket-balls, painted a bilious brown....

"Bombs ..." With a thrill of pleasurable recognition John picks up one of the cricket-balls and weighs it in his hand. "Our make too. Some find!" he thinks. "Now, where did they get these? ... Snapped up a string of mules at the tail of an ammunition-convoy, or found 'em in some abandoned dump on the Peninsula, when the Expeditionary Army evacuated Gallipoli! ... Anyhow they come in handy. Damned handy! ... Let's look in another box...."

He breaks open four more, with the assistance of the spanner. Two out of the lot hold bombs, British-made, pitched in higgledy-piggledy, with the recklessness that may be born of Mohammedan fatalism. The others prove to contain paper clips of cartridges, marked for use in the 1890 pattern Mauser magazine-rifle of 7.56. mm.

Two boxes of British bombs, at this especial juncture, come to John Hazel as manna from the skies. If there is a weapon the ex-insurance broker of Cornhill prefers before all known devices for killing other men—that weapon is the bomb, of the cricket-ball, hand-pitched variety, that makes of one long-armed man, the equal of many men armed....

At Rondes Poix in the March of 1915, a party of Fenchurch Street Fusiliers being hemmed in at an advanced post by the enemy, Private Hazel and Private Spurge—a rival star-artist in the line of effective bomb-throwing—kept the Hun at bay for eleven hours by pitching cricket-ball bombs.

Again, in the April of that year, east of "that mad place called Ypres," John, possibly urged to derring-do by the urgent spirit of Sergeant Harris, and armed with a bag of bombs of this variety—crawled through a hole in the enemy's barbed-wire, and single-handed—argued in such wise with the Germans established at a certain machine-gun position, that the Fenchurch Streets—charging over the front-line parapet at the critical moment, were able to clear three hundred yards of the trench in question, and held the same triumphantly for the rest of the fighting day. The D.C.M., that silver disc bearing his Sovereign's bust, which he calls his "bit of tin" and is secretly vain of,—was subsequently bestowed on Private Hazel when a patient at the Auxiliary Military War Hospital, of Colthill, Middlesex, in recognition of this feat.

"Given they're not duds," he murmurs now, lovingly toying with the spring-pin of one of the cricket-balls, "I could hold up a half-battalion of Turks with these, until the cows come home! ..."

He looks up to his left and right, roughly estimating the height of the defile, the perpendicular walls of which are somewhat lower on his left than on his right-hand—and calculates the width of the road here at under twenty feet. More like eighteen-and-a-half. Well, given that to-night's attempt at the rescue of Father Julian Forbis does not prove a washout—here is the wherewithal to keep the road, in case of a pursuit....

Twilight creeps on. The crickets chirp, and noiseless as a shadow, the great owl slips from the thicket and takes his soundless flight. The little owls hunt in the grass for frogs, lizards and beetles, and the great bats come out of the crannies in the rocks to gorge themselves with fruit.

For a while the guns have ceased to argue, and the night is still and breathless; not the clear violet night of Syria, radiant with dazzling silver light of moon and starshine, but a moonless night of semi-obscurity, and diffuse and formless shadows, with menacing rumbles of thunder in the east, where sheet-lightning flickers now and then. Venus suspends her sapphire lamp above the hills of Judæa, and the Pleiades shine almost directly overhead. Bright-armed Orion rises in splendour over the ramparts of blue-black cumuli that brood in the east over the Mountains of Gilead. Low down, through a jagged cleft in these, twinkles the star Y Crucis, that forms the summit of the Southern Cross....

No trot of hoofs on the stony road draws nearer from the eastward; no clink of spur on scabbard, or bit against chain-bridle, tells of the approach of a cavalry patrol along the Jaffa Road. There are yet three hours and more to wait for the sound of hoof-beats coming from Shechem, that may signify the escape of the prisoner from the Bey's wire cage.

Does all go well? Has Esther Hazaël carried out her stratagem? She has shown John how—when the Dark comes down—she will feed the prisoner. By a device almost absurd in its direct simplicity—used, in this Eastern land, millions of times ere now. Women are cunning in such tricks, and full of subtle resources.... Well for men that it is so!—especially in time of War....

Ummshni is at her business now. John feels certain. He nods to himself, solemnly, and sitting on the lid of one of the broken bomb-boxes, folds his great arms, narrows his eyelids and sends his Thought ranging abroad in search of her.

Perhaps he sleeps and dreams, sitting there. Who knows whether he does or does not. But after some moments of silent concentration, he sees his messenger go forth. A tiny thing—human in form, light as a puff of thistledown, no bigger than a locust—it leaps down to the big Jew's knees, and thence to the bottom of the lorry; drops from it into the dust and scours down the road. Swift as the wind, it passes over the highway—reaches the west gate of Shechem and slips through a crevice in the ponderous iron-studded timbers, lodging between the sandalled feet of the Mustahfiz infantry guard.... Now it goes by the Khan of the Fox, darts through the square where the archway is (under which the Orderly Staff Sergeant Major of the German Intelligence Department waited for the dropping of the despatch-bag from the Two Faced Nightingale), traverses the town, thronged to-night with variously attired strangers of many nations, and—lightly as a withered leaf, and inconspicuous as a dust-swirl—traverses the main thoroughfare of the ancient town.

Shechem is packed to the walls to-night with the exiles from Jerusalem. And in addition to these, with strangers in foreign clothing, diverse in type, sinister-faced and stern-eyed, speaking unknown languages.... There are many Turkish officers, young and old, in uniform and out of it, and German officers of many ranks and decorations, accompanied by women, painted and overdressed.

So many strange feet, bringing strange dust from strange lands. Yet the little thing no bigger than a leaf finds a way between them all. Now it spins out at the east gate and rolls down the rutted road towards the Wired Enclosure.... Here storm-lamps hang outside the guard-tent and on either side of the entrance. The officer's tent is lighted within, but unlike the tent of the postas, it is furnished with a door-flap. From inside comes the sound of laughter, the clinking of glasses, and unmistakably, the rattle of shaken dice. Near the gate, in conversation with the bash-châwush of the guard, stands a tall, thin, elderly Bedawi, known to the reader as the Shaykh Gôhar.

"Nay, nay! Do not trouble the Yuzbashi." He waves a hand in the direction of the tent whence comes the convivial clink. "The affairs of the humble must wait upon the leisure of the great ones. Yet if thy dignity were not lowered by the mention of a hundred piastres—one lira Osmanli—" Gôhar carelessly displays the coin.

"O my friend! O my soul!" hiccups the bash-châwush, who at this early stage of the evening is only amiably drunk. "I will do thine errand with gladness for friendship's sake only!" Having duly received and pouched the coin, he adds: "Now tell thy business to me."

"Briefly, it was but to ask thy Yuzbashi to accord me the watchword, the Emir Fadl Anga having cause to pass the gates to-night. In thine ear, O friend! he hath a pigeon to fly at dawn for Mecca, and he is minded to loose the bird from the Mount."

The bash-châwush nods and disappears into the tent, whence, sung in a high nasal tenor voice to lute-accompaniment, issue the unblushing erotics of an Arab love-song. The Shaykh turns to one of the postas lounging near the guard-tent, and smilingly offers him a handful of thick Arab cigarettes.

"Dost thou use the Consoler? ... Take, then!"

"May Allah make it 'take' upon thee, O generous hearted one! ..."

As the handful changes owners, and other soldiers look out of the corners of their eyes and sidle nearer, the Shaykh plunges both hands into deep pockets beneath his mantle, and draws them forth generously filled with the thick, strong cigarettes.

Upon the return of the bash-châwush with the information—willingly placed at the service of the Emir—that the pass-word of the night is "Baal Zebub," he, too, accepts a handful of the cigarettes that are so heavily drugged with opium. And then the Shaykh Gôhar, with ceremonious farewells, stalks away from the Wired Enclosure, knowing his work begun.

XII

Since the departure of the Shaykh Sadân, the man who sank fainting to the floor of the wooden hut has moved once only. It was when he revived, dragged himself to his knees, and while his strength sufficed—lifting his clasped hands above his head—sent forth his soul in prayer.... Exhausted then, he collapsed once more, and dropped forwards, falling with outflung arms across the palm-wood bed-frame, and for how long he does not know, was lost in unconsciousness.

When sight and hearing return to him, thick darkness presses on his burning eyeballs, and the "Lights Out" of the Turkish boruzan is ringing in his ears. Half kneeling by the anghareb, half lying across it, his face is turned towards the east wall of the hut. Through a biggish knot-hole in the planks, he has found it possible to see—given sufficient light outside—beyond the barbed wire fence a circumscribed patch of the south-going road, the tumbled hills in the distance and the dome of the Tomb of Joseph in the foreground.... These intermittently blotted out by the figure of the Turkish sentry, passing to the end of his beat at the south angle of the Enclosure, or passing back to the angle at the junction of the road that leads to the town's east gate, with the Jerusalem-Shechem Road.

Even in darkness, the edges of the knot-hole are outlined by a fitful glimmer. The flash of an electric torch, the twinkle of a firefly, the ray of a shooting-star—there are many in this month of November—find their way through the knot-hole in the wall.

But the knot-hole is no longer there. They have stopped it up from outside! he thinks, and a groan breaks from him. He has borne so much that this little thing—fresh evidence of studied malice on the part of his jailers—hurts, like the brutal tearing of a bandage from a stiffened wound.... He shudders, hearing a curious, scratching, rasping sound, mingled with low whispering:

"Sidi, Sidi! ... Sidi, Sidi!"

His blood freezes in his veins. What is that strange, soft voice, and where does it come from? Can this be another essay on the part of the Shaykh Sadân? He waits for the next move—setting his teeth, steeling his soul with faith in his Master. Now, now, the whispering comes again:

"Sidi, Sidi! Do you hear me? O Sidi, are you there? ..."

It is the thin, rustling voice of the little Mother of Ugliness. He utters a stifled cry of joy, and dragging his chain with him, rolls off the anghareb, and in his weakness, sinks down close to the hut's east wall. Passing his thin hands over the wall in the darkness, he encounters a projection. The end of a long rubber-covered cane, from which the whispering comes:

"If the Sidi hears my voice, let him be pleased to answer! It is Ummshni! ..."

"I hear," he calls back through the improvised speaking-tube. "May God reward thee, gentle heart! How didst thou find me out? ..."

"How, is a long story meet for telling elsewhere. Has the Sidi a bowl, or other vessel? If not let him set mouth to the end of this," the speaker taps on the tube gently with a fingernail, "and I will pour milk through the canes. Tap thrice when I am to pour! ..."

He does so, and the tube is slowly tilted, and a cautious trickle of boiled goat's milk flows over his parched tongue. He sucks for life, and when he has drunk:

"Rest now," says the whispering voice. "It is ill to take overmuch at the beginning. Next time I will give thee broth, and afterwards good wine. For the Sidi must be strengthened against the hour when for the prisoner comes Rescue. Let him tap thrice on the pipe if he has heard...."

He taps on the cane-lined length of rubber tubing.... The little voice goes on:

"Listen, my lord! ... At midnight thy friends will come to deliver thee. So, when thou hast well taken the soup and wine, lie down on the bed and rest.... Sleep if thou canst, but not too sound. When there comes a scraping in the earth under the bedstead, rise up and move aside the anghareb. My lord has clearly heard? ..."

He signifies assent, and the voice goes on whispering, sending a reviving stream of Hope into his empty, sapless heart, that is invigorating to his drooping spirit, as the milk to his famished body.

"Lift up the anghareb, and thou wilt find a hole in the earth under it. Planks covered with earth hide the hole. The hole is the Gate of Hope for thee!—the Way that leads to Freedom! Does the Sidi understand?"

"I do, and thank thee from my soul! ... Who are the friends, Ummshni? I only have known of one beside thyself. But no word has reached me from that man, since the War Prisoners were shifted from camp at Beersheba to the Barracks here at Shechem!"

"Thou hast four friends here besides myself!"

He did not know he was so rich, and a thrill of joy goes through him.

"The chief of them is Edward Yaill. Thou dost recall that name? Ay! Then comes John Hazaël...."

That the prisoner has no knowledge of John Hazaël, his silence seems to testify.

"It does not matter!" The little voice is dry. "The friends to whom we owe the most are often strangers to us. Now it is time to give thee the broth!"

He sucks the life-giving stuff through the tube. With her womanly, maternal solicitude, she checks him after a little:

"Stay, now.... The Sidi feels his strength increased? ..."

He does, and says so gratefully.

"Then—lest it make the Master sleep too heavily, I will not give him the wine yet. Now let him lie down awhile on the bed that is in there. I remain outside, watching. What says my lord?"

"The sentry.... How is it he does not see thee? ..."

Something like Ummshni's little rustling laugh comes through the rubber-covered pipe-stems.

"Love hath no eyes, it is often said. Since a white flower fell on the dust in the dusk, and a light foot went past him, is Baba Ishak, the Darweesh, blind—and dumb as well, ah-hah! Now he is at the other end of his beat, his face set to Ebal, and the Tombs of the Sons of Mohammed. He is waiting Opportunity, as a dog near the butcher's shop.... When the butcher looks the other way—or goes into the house to speak to his wife, the dog sneaks round the doorpost and—his head is in the scrap-box! Sweet,—the first greedy crunch, and gulp.... But then comes the butcher's chopper—down on the dog's skull! Now lie thou down and try to sleep. I have said I will keep watch here! ..."

Holding his chain so that it may not clank, Father Julian creeps back to the verminous bed, and tries to do her bidding. But the throbbing of his anxious heart and the roaring of the blood in his ears make sleep impossible. The cheap gun-metal wrist-watch that he wears has not been taken from him, and it has been kept wound up—it is ticking companionably now. Four matches are left in his box. Sheltering the flame within the coat that serves him as a bed-covering, he strikes a match, and looks at the watch. It is twenty minutes past ten o'clock, and Deliverance comes at midnight. How wait through the long hours, for that knocking under the floor?

The Darweesh who is imâm of his platoon, and can resist all the Forbidden Things except the Cup of Beauty, stands at the north angle of the Wired Place, looking towards the Tombs. In his hot thick hand is a white rose, sweet and musky-smelling, in his nostrils a whiff of sandal and some pungent Bazâr perfume. The Baba is a little man, and his inamorata a tallish woman, but she looked a strapping wench to-night, as she passed him at the other end of his beat, with a whispered word and a dropped flower, and a provocative flash of her gipsy-eyes from the folds of her white izar.

He wheels, smacks the butt of his Mauser rifle with the flat of his broad hand, and licks his thick lips longingly. Turning out his sandalled toes—for the second-line troops of the Redif stick to the old-fashioned chariks, with bandages wound round the leg from the calf down—he marches towards the sentry-box where Delilah waits for him.

There is little breeze on this muggy night of scant starshine and blotted shadows, but a south-going waft sends a withered leaf or a torn scrap of paper scurrying at Baba Ishak's heels along the dusty road.

"Tr'rp—tr'rp—tr'rp!" ...

A tiny sound, and yet it irks and fidgets.

"Trrp—tr'rp ...!"

Whatever it is, it scurries past, as the Darweesh halts before the sentry-box. Snuffing the clamorous perfume of the Bazâr with an anticipative smile on his thick lips, he stands on the threshold and peers into the darkness.

"Inaini!" he coos, amorously to the odorous obscurity. "My soul! My eyes! Thou hast come to me! Tell me that thou art there? ..."

Undoubtedly Inaini is there, he can see her white figure plainly against the shadowy background. It is late in the day for Inaini to be coy, but too early not to humour her. He stretches out a greedy, perspiring hand. It touches the folds of her izar. Stung to enterprise, prodded by propinquity, the Baba puts down his Mauser, carefully leaning it against the side of the sentry-box, and blunders forwards. Aha! At last he has her, the willing prisoner of his eager arms.

Mashâllah! how the gipsy hugs. All the breath is squeezed out of the Baba. What is this that coils about him, binding down his arms? Not a rope? Chok! chok! He opens his jaws to expostulate—and a gag of oiled camel-hide is deftly slipped between them—and strapped uncomfortably tight at the back of his bull-neck. Swiftly his knees are bound, and then his ankles, and he is tenderly lowered to the bottom of the sentry-box.

The love affair of the Baba and the gipsy has ended with dramatic swiftness. Now the dark figure of a man steps out of the sentry-box, picks up the Mauser and resumes the beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and gleam glints on the bandolier taken from the victim, it shows the face of Namrûd under the khaki enverieh. And caught in some stray backwash of the sickly breeze that carried it, the tiny thing like a withered leaf, flits down the road again.

XIII

Whether John Hazel dreamed or not, things have happened as he has seen them. Conscious thought returns to him, sitting on the box of bombs. His lungs fill with a deep breath. He yawns hugely, blinks his eyes, squares his shoulders and looks about him. The constellation Orion blazes over Gilead, the Pleiades are hidden from sight by sombre clouds. There is a strange glare in the sky over the crest of Gerizim.

In mid-song the bulbuls have fallen silent. Even the pariah-dogs and the jackals are still. There is something abroad upon the air to-night, that weighs upon the spirit of humanity, and daunts the creatures, soulless as we imagine, with the sense of evil, nameless and unseen, but dominant and powerful to harm....

And now the man who listens at his post hears the quick beat of galloping hoofs coming along the Shechem road, and thrills with expectation:

"That's them!" In moments of keen excitement John's grammar is apt to fail. "Them, for a quid! Or the Colonel hasn't pulled off the snatch, and has had—"

He breaks off as the horsemen round a curve of the road. Where a patch of the grudging moonlight whitens the ground, he makes out that there are only three of them. No! Four—! Three riders in ample, flowing Arab dress, and a fourth in the close-fitting kit of a European—who reels and sways unsteadily in his saddle, and would fall—but for the help that another gives—with a hand that is sometimes at his back, and sometimes at his bridle.

"By God!—"

With a great exultant throb, John swings himself down from the lorry upon the road, as the riders check the gallop of their eager, snorting horses.... And the hot, white limestone dust of Samaria rises in pungent clouds.

Now through the dust an immense hand finds, grips and wrings the priest's, and a deep resonant voice, not like any he has heard before, and yet not strange, says rapidly:

"Thanks be to the Most High, my lord is delivered! Now, from the servant of his house, let him take this. It comes from the Sister of my lord" (a crumpled envelope is thrust into Julian Forbis's palm), "by the hand of John Hazel!"

"A letter from my sister.... Sir, may God reward you! You must be John Hazaël, I think! Though I never heard that name until to-night, while I live I shall always bless it!"

The voice sends an electric shock volting through John. It is like the voice he loves, as a man's may resemble a woman's, deeper, stronger, and hollow with fatigue. He returns:

"My lord is right. I am the man John. Youngest and last of all Hazaëls of the line save one only.... But all the Hazaëls, from the first to the last, do battle for my lord this night in Samaria. Now let my lord ride hard for Kir Saba. Though his enemies pursue they shall not pass here! For, God so willing, I, thy servant, will keep this road barred!"

"My cousin John! ..."

He hears a timid call he knows, and turning towards the quarter whence it comes, traces it to its source in a small rebellious bundle, held on the front of an Arab's saddle.

"O John my cousin, dost thou hear me! Entreat the Most Excellent One to set me on the ground!"

"Mr. Hazel, with your good leave, I mean to take this lady to Kir Saba." It is the voice that spoke to him last in the chintz drawing-room at Kerr's Arbour. Dimly seen in the hazy moonlight, the eyes shaded by the silken kuffiyeh meet John's, and although they are blazing with the fierce joy of the successful raider, he recognises the eyes of Edward Yaill.

"Nay, nay! I would remain here with John Hazaël," the little creature pleads in her distress.

"Thou wilt go with my lord and be his handmaid. When he needs thee no longer, then return to me. Hearest thou, woman?" the deep voice says, and Ummshni, bowing her veiled head, humbly answers:

"O Head of our House, I hear! ..."

"Farewell then, little Brave One!"

In the dark John reaches out, and pats her small cold hand.

"Not in this world, nor in the next will this that thou hast lone go unrewarded. What is that? ... Cavalry on the road!" His hearing, in this strange exalted mood of his, being even keener than Namrûd the Hunter's,—has warned him that a body of mounted men, coming from the direction of Shechem, are pushing along the road. He relapses into his ordinary, natural tone, as he says with a slap of his heavy hand on the flank of Fadl Anga's thoroughbred: "Ride for Kir Saba, Colonel Yaill, and all good luck to you!"

"Thanks, Mr. Hazel, and good-bye. Though I would prefer your coming with us. You could take Namrûd's horse—and he and I would ride and run by turns. Not the first time we've covered distance that way!"

There is an unalterable decision in the answer:

"Much obliged, Colonel, but I've arranged to stay."

"Good luck, then, and good-bye. You will shake hands at parting? ..."

The huge hand of the big Jew, and Yaill's leaner, slenderer, smaller hand, meet and grip hard, then John steps backwards.

"Ride like old hell, the lot of you. I stop—to carry on!"

A clatter of hoofs and they are away, in a cloud of the dust of Samaria, flavoured with the chamomile and wormwood of the desert, the acrid sweat of man and horse, tobacco, attar of roses, and leather tanned by Bedwân with bitter laurel-bark. John Hazel looks about him, fills his lungs with deep breaths and calculates his powers. How if one man were able to move the lorry across the road!

He frees himself from his Arab head-cloth and mantle, ties the ends of the long sleeves of his kumbas together, slips the knot Fellah-wise over his head, and pulls up the camel-hair shirt to mid-thigh. Even as the lean, tanned Prophet girded himself for the long race from Carmel up to Samaria, before the King in his ivory chariot—and the rainstorm hurtling on the heels of the King....

Now he swings himself to the driver's seat, manipulates the steering wheel, and lifts the starting-lever. Now he gets down, spins the crank, and heaves at the near fore-wheel. The lorry shakes, the ponderous armoured wheel moves—and the sweat pours off John Hazel. He sets his teeth, and braces himself again, using the sound, uninjured leg as fulcrum of the lever. With a sound like the dumping of a load of ancient iron on the scrap-heap—the Turkish ammunition-lorry moves across the road....

Just in time, for the clink of cavalry chain-bridles and scabbards, and the clatter of hoofs come nearer with every instant.... John fills the breast of his Arab shirt with bombs, and stands up on the lorry, in the straddling but purposeful attitude attributed to the Colossus of Rhodes.

"Old Harris and the chaps of my platoon used to call me a dirty fighter," he thinks, reverting to the vernacular of his adoptive land. "Well, this is going to be the dirtiest fight I ever put up. O all you old Hazaël men, back to the very oldest, help me to keep the road that leads to Kir Saba, for to-night! ..."

Rattle and clink. The creak and wheeze of straining leather. Half a squadron of Turkish Mounted Police spur round the bend in the road.

Well armed, well mounted, big and bearded Turks, the pick of the Bey's squadrons of mounted gendarmerie. The darkness hides the crimson fez and the smart Hussar uniform of dark blue with red and orange braiding. But what light there is is caught and given back by long shiny jack-boots—and the barrels of Winchester repeating-rifles—and eyes that glitter in swarthy faces that are ablaze with the hope of a reward.

Crash! ...

A bomb falls in the middle of the road in front of the squadron-leader, and explodes with a shattering detonation that calls loud echoes from the hills. The squadron-leader's jaw is torn away. He and his horse go down, the poor brute screaming in a pool of his own innocent blood and vainly struggling to rise upon his shattered forelegs.... Two of the other riders are wounded by flying splinters. Crash!—another bomb falls and detonates in the road....

"A Forbis! A Forbis! May Forbis foes fall! A Forbis! A Forbis! ..."

With this strange foreign slogan the Hills of Samaria ring, and a volley from the Winchesters of the Bey's men rattles back in answer. Bullets flatten on the rocks—pass through the sides of the lorry, shiver the lamps, rip the front hood, and dent the engine-bonnet. A second Winchester-volley clatters amongst the rocks—when a bomb, hurled by a phenomenally long arm, falls in the midst of the squadron. And the Bey's Mounted Policemen scatter and retreat in confusion, leaving dead men and horses behind them on the road....

John draws breath. A revolver cracks behind him—a bullet sings past his right cheek—and another, whistling through his hair, burns as it scores a furrow in the scalp at the top of his head....

"Bloody close! And fired from behind!"

He looks round, and is shot at from the original quarter to intimate that the retreat was only a feint. The baffled force of gendarmerie—trained scouts for the most part—mountaineers and hunters, has split into two parties; the hardier spirits—as the breaking of branches and the fluttering of birds scared from the coverts testifies—are scrambling down the steep face of the defile, from the northern side of the road.

Again a revolver-shot cracks out behind John. He slews his head and catches a glimpse of the man who fired, crouching behind a boulder, on the Jaffa side of the lorry.

Crash! crash! ...

Two bombs greet the renewal of the attack upon the Shechem side.... Three, hurled one after the other with dazzling rapidity, explode in the covert that clothes the cliff-face. Another hits the boulder by the road, and lessens its proportions. But the sharp brain behind it has foreseen that it would come.

Lying on his stomach, the Bey's man crawls to the opposite side of the highway. Crouching in the shadows, he waits unseen. The scene is handsomely illuminated now by bonfires among the brushwood. Bombs explode east and west, the arms of the giant on the lorry whirl like the sails of a windmill. It is at this juncture that John begins to sing....

Never did light of moon and stars shine on a grimmer spectacle. Foul with grime, whitened with dust, smeared and raddled with blood from his scalp-wound, the leaping fires on either hand show him black as a fiend from hell. The Bey's gendarme is a plucky child of Islam, but he shudders. What if no human, killable man, but one of the demon Sons of Iblis be he who is capering and dealing Death on the Jaffa-Shechem road to-night? Streaming with sweat, stricken with deadly fear, he gasps:

"Mashallah! I invoke the Protection of the Most High against Satan the Stoned! ..."

And springing up, sets a foot on the wheel, and leaps into the lorry. Next moment, locked in a wrestling-hug, two black shapes strive together, while the zabtiehs hold their fire for fear of hitting their own man.

The struggle is over in less than half a minute. The Turk is strong, but in those great and ruthless hands, he is dealt with easily. His foot slips in his opponent's blood, for the giant is bleeding freely from chips in various places. He yells as he is bent back.... Then his spurred feet are lifted. He is tossed out of the lorry, landing on his head—and as John continues bomb-throwing—loses temporarily, all interest in the fight....

Now comes from the Shechem side, a charge of mounted zabtiehs. John sings as he pulls pins,—pitches and proves the impotence of flesh and blood, human and equine, pitted against H.E. The police are shooting freely but wildly from behind and before him. Right and left he gives them the last sigh of No. 1 box—and is diving into the other—to rise up armed, when a bomb, that has fallen in the roadway without the customary explosion—is picked up by a plucky zabtieh and hurled back into the lorry....

John realises as the projectile falls amongst the boxed explosives that the fight is over. He leaps from the lorry on the Jaffa side, and knows no more. Miles away southward, as the huge detonation shakes the hills, and avalanches of débris tumble from the cliffs, a Gunner Officer of a Field Battery of the 52nd Division, holding the mud village of Mughar, says to his colleague indifferently, shutting his night-glasses:

"The Huns are having the time of their lives to-night in Samaria. Regular posh firework-display to-night on the Shechem-Jaffa road. Now they've exploded an ammunition-dump, or something uncommonly like it! Hope it's wiped out a few more Turks!—there are plenty of 'em to spare!"

XIV

For Katharine Forbis those two days of suspense, so fraught with fate for the two she held dearest, were ordeals of anguish only made bearable by the work that filled the daylight hours and the sleep, begotten of the work—that came to her at night. On the morning following the bomb-fight on the Shechem-Jaffa Road, the Base was ringing with the seizure of Junction Station; the sensational escape of Von Kressenstein's train, and the taking, by cavalry charges from the north, of the strong place of Mughar—a mud village on a hill, converted into a veritable wasp's nest by Turkish mountain-howitzers, Turkish machine gunners and Turkish riflemen.

The temper of the enemy stiffened. Resistance still was stubborn—difficulties of transport still held up the Expeditionary Army in full sight of the Jerusalem-Shechem Road. Yet it was the Day of the White Arm.... Three Captains' Crusaders of the Bucks Hussars and Dorset Yeomanry led the dazzling charges that cleared the way for the 52nd Division, and made of Mughar "not a sweet place to look at," as an English War Correspondent put it pithily—for many Turkish heads being cleft in twain after the approved mediæval method—the place wanted a lot of cleaning up. One of the glorious Three—son of a great English Statesman, himself an Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs and one of the Chief Whips of the 1915 Ministry—was shot barely twelve hours after the victory. And before sunset on this day, a distinguished Jew; financier, soldier, sportsman, philanthropist—met death almost within sight of the Colonies founded by his family on the Plains of Sharon, and south of Jaffa the Beautiful....

On this same date Maurice Hazel, piloting a Handley-Page bomber on a raid over the Hindenburg Line, was killed by a hit from German shrapnel.... And Lady Wastwood, reading the War News in the late edition of the Alexandrian Courier and crying over men who had been ancient flames, and boys who had been her dead boy's School-chums—came on this undistinguished item among the casualties, and recognised the name.

"'Maurice Benn Hazel' ... Kathy's huge Jew friend mentioned having a brother Maurice in the R.F.C. As I really want an excuse for a word with Kathy, I'll look her up and mention the thing. Though it seems rather like making use of the poor dear boy! How callous we're all getting. But I suppose we have to be, to carry on at all!"

With which conclusion, the day's work being over, Trixie removed the traces of emotion with powder, and betook herself in search of Katharine.

She found Miss Forbis in the rose-garden pavilion, reading letters from England that had come by the afternoon's mail. Time had not served until now to open them, and the first envelope had contained a type-written enclosure within, a communication from Sir Arthur Ely, appended here below:

HOLBORN COURT, November 3rd, 1917.

"MY DEAR MISS FORBIS,

Knowing you to be working with the Red Cross at Montana Convalescent Hospital near Alexandria, and in the hope that Colonel Yaill—from whom I have not heard since he left England last February, may have communicated to you his present address—I have thought it best to send you the enclosed copy of a letter recently delivered at his Club, and opened by me as his solicitor—having authority from him, in his absence, to deal with his correspondence, and administer his business affairs. I am sufficiently old a friend of his and yours also, to add my heartiest congratulations to you both.

"Very sincerely yours, "ARTHUR CAMERON ELY."

Here is the enclosure:

"PARK AUXILIARY MILITARY HOSPITAL, "HOODING, "SUSSEX.

"November 2, 1917

"DEAR SIR:

"A friend of mine who you met under the name of Nurse Lucy Burtonshaw at the Convalescent Officers Camp, B—— Base in November 1915 has asked me to write you her hands being full at present and feeling herself unequal to the task.

"The fact is that while finishing her three years service as a Probationer at the County General Hospital Leam Somerset in 1913 she was married on the strict Q.T. at the Registrar's Office Leam to Private J. Didlick of the 5th Lancers a young man known from childhood and objected to by Lucy's parents on the grounds of his being the son of the local baker and too much given to drink. In August 1914 Private Didlick went to the Front with the First Expeditionary Army and his name duly appeared upon the list of Killed after the Battle of Mons. Nurse Burtonshaw regrets that she omitted to mention this at the time of your marriage her hands being so full just then.

"I will not detain you further except by saying that in April last on the eve of the Battle of Arras Private now Lance-Corporal Didlick with several other British prisoners escaped from the zone of fire where they had been kept by the Germans at forced work and very badly used Corporal Didlick particularly being covered with boils and weighing only 8st. 31bs. when drafted Home and later on sent to this Hospital I could hardly recognise him. Later I communicated with his wife and advised her to break the news to you her proper place undoubtedly being by her poor husband's side. Her hands being full she has put off writing up to the present. Now at her request us being old friends I have taken up the pen.

"Mrs. Didlick earnestly hopes you will regard bygones as bygones and requests me herewith to enclose your cheque received for her last quarter's allowance regularly forwarded since February by your Solicitor, Sir Arthur Ely to whose care this communication is addressed. In case of loss in the post things being so uncertain in War Time I have sent another letter similarly worded care of Miss Forbis, Kerr's Arbour, Nr Cauldstanes Tweedshire, N.B.

"I remain, Dear Sir, "Truly yours "DOROTHY PIDGE, "Certified Nurse ——th Nursing Unit R.R.C."

"P.S. Excuse the liberty but I do hope you won't be hard on Lucy! She means well but hasn't a particle of moral backbone."

If Katharine perused this queer letter with mingled sensations, amazed joy and unutterable relief ruled predominant above all.

For it was over, the haunting day and nightmare of loss and separation. Her bosom rose upon a long breath of relief, as the burden passed away. The barrier dividing Katharine from all she held dearest, had vanished at the wholesome touch of loyal Nurse Dorothy Pidge.

"Thank God! and thank you—you honest-hearted woman! Now to tell Edward—if I knew where to reach him!" was her thought. And the claws of suspense fastened in her soul anew, and that moment's joyful lightening of her heart made the weight that burdened it even more intolerable to bear.

Not the cool sea-breeze that stole through the fretted sides of the Khedive's marble pavilion, the beloved haunt of her leisure, nor the fragrance of the November-blooming roses that climbed its walls, and wreathed the balustrade of its terrace with trails of pink and orange, cream and white and crimson; not the nightingales that sang in the moss-cup oaks, nor the orioles that built amongst the vine-trellises—where the fireflies would twinkle and gleam at dusk when the nightingales sang their sweetest—could bring soothing to her tortured mind, or rest to her overwrought nerves.

"I can't—stand—much more!" she said slowly, speaking aloud of purpose, for the sheer relief of speech. "We have all got a point beyond which we break, and this is my breaking-point. Oh! for some news of those three men of mine!"

Edward Yaill, Julian and John Hazel.... She saw them individually, each reduced to the size of a gnat, at the end of a long vista, striving, and striving desperately, yet unable to meet and touch. She saw them in the midst of a cloud of other human gnats, buzzing and stinging.... She saw them borne down by numbers—she saw them emerge triumphant. She saw—

"Darling Kathy, do unclench your hands and iron out your forehead," said the welcome voice of Trixie at this juncture: "Even a woman with your appearance cannot afford to go on, looking like Lady Macbeth, Clytemnestra and Antigone, rolled into one, for long!"

"Did I ... Do I?" Katharine asked absently....

"You both did and do," Trixie returned. She came and sat on the balcony near Katharine and touched her lightly on the shoulder with a long, thin but sympathetic hand. "You're rather a terrifying person when you look like this, but I have a reason for being venturesome. May I broach a subject I've avoided for ages? I need hardly explain, I fancy, that the subject is Edward Yaill?"

Such burning colour flooded the face now turned to hers, that Trixie experienced relief from forebodings that had haunted her. The colossal coffee-coloured Jew with the coarse black hair, Cockney accent and huge nose was nothing to Kathy! She always had had that wonderful look when you mentioned Edward Yaill. She was unchanged... It upset you to imagine that women like Kathy altered. It did you good to find out that she stuck to the old love....

The subject broached, Trixie told her tale. Faithful to the motto of the Liberal Ladies War Service League, "Do Anything, Go Anywhere, Stick at Nothing and Never Grouse!" she had, pending her return to active usefulness, been "rummaging out" cases in the General Hospitals who wanted extra visiting, letter-writing and bucking. And at No. 11 she had come across a Nice Man, newly convalescent from a collection of intestinal symptoms prevalent among the Expeditionary Forces,—assembled by the C.M.O. under the heading "Bilharziosis," and simplified to "Bill Harris," in the mouths of sufferers therefrom....

"A Sergeant of the 'Tweedburgh Regiment' transferred— Don't ask me how! to a Lowland Territorial Battalion, and perfectly devoted to Colonel Yaill. Nearly cried when he talked of him. Desperately keen to get a letter written and smuggled Home—for of course the Censor wouldn't dream of passing it!—to Yaill's sisters at his place in Cumberland, and another to Miss Forbis, 'her that the Colonel ought to have been married on—saying the Colonel is alive and serving with the Secret Intelligence Corps in the Front in Palestine.'"

"Dear Lady Wastwood—"

"My child, don't put me off with interruptions! Of course I explained to my poor sick man that the letter couldn't be properly engineered, and might do Colonel Yaill harm if the contents got out. But I told him you were out here, and should have his information. The man swears Edward to be an intrepid Scout, famous for making his way through the Turkish Lines, on foot or mounted on a swift horse, sometimes alone!—sometimes with two companions.... He has been seen in Cairo dressed as a French Staff Officer—we know he speaks the language perfectly!—and in Constantinople as a Greek Interpreter to one of the Embassies. And here in Alex, he has gone about disguised as an Arab—or a Gippy of the Labour Corps—"

"I know it, dear Lady Wastwood, I was almost sure of it before!—I have been certain since John Hazel came back from the Front four days ago, to tell me—"

Trixie's green eyes enlarged under their arched black eyebrows, that so much resembled musical slurs.

"Of course! I might have known. Do go on, like a Precious Person! If a sieve about my own affairs, I'm a tomb for the secrets of others!"

So Katharine, knowing this to be true, told Trixie the reason of her anxiety. Characteristically the long thin finger pointed to the doubtful spot:

"It's thrilling in the extreme. No wonder you're in tatters with anxiety. But I can't help seeing that it's rather fatal to have two different people plotting to save one man. Almost like a brace of dentists tugging at a single tooth, isn't it? Why couldn't they have Joined forces and worked it as a Syndicate? That's what your John Hazel will try for, I feel it in my bones. One thing I must say! I do wish the Basilisk hadn't anything to do with it! That oily-tongued little Egyptian Flying Pasha gives me the creeps! But the main thing just now is to buck up, and believe that everything will come off rippingly. And I have a feeling in my bones it will!"

"And if it doesn't—if the news is the worst that can be told, I hope that I shall be brave enough to bear it!" said Katharine. "I hope that I shall never swerve from the belief that Love—as it exists between clean-souled men and women—isn't only for this world! And that the pain of frustrated earthly passion may be so mingled with the Faith that looks forward,—forward and Heavenward!—that parting for this little life may be robbed of its bitterest sting!"

"My dear, I can't climb up to your level," said Trixie, blinking her green eyes and pursing her V-shaped, Pierrot mouth. "This world—when my husband and boys were in it—was good enough, I'm ashamed to say! And if they were back, I'm not going to pretend I should bother much about Heaven, and I do hope you've too much sense to believe that I should! But this business of yours will be pulled off all right. I feel it in my bones, and they never deceive me. Your brother Julian and your friend the Jew, and poor Edward Yaill—whom I treated so frightfully out of pure championship for you when he fell over my feet into the Express for Carlisle—that he fell out again!—All three will get safe out of the place with the name that reminds me of Sunday School examinations. And you and I will be standing here, like the heroine and her bosom-friend in the scene that comes just before the return of the hero in what American people call a four-mile-reel-scream, when a letter or a wire will bring the glad news. And you will read out the letter to me as they say the film people do it, keeping your features intelligently in play, and saying anything that comes into your head. Like this: 'Pepper, mustard, Cerebos, olive-oil and salad dressing! Piccalilli and catsup. O, Harrods! ... After all these months of beastly eating—tinned brawn for lunch again!'"

Trixie's well-meant nonsense served its end, for Katharine could resist no more and burst out laughing.

"You dear!" Miss Forbis's laughing eyes were soft as she passed an arm round the long narrow waist and warmly kissed the thin white cheek. She added, as Trixie returned the caress: "You're priceless to me, Commandant! When I feel down, or get the blues—with reason or without them—you're a better pick-me-up than all the Worcester sauce in the world."

"Horrible stuff!" Trixie made a grimace, "I've always loathed it. Once I had a dear old friend who drank herself to death on that. Her husband—lucky man! never suspected until she died—and they found the chimney in her dressing-room simply blocked with empty shilling bottles. Who's that? Di ê di? Have you a message there? ..."

A cautious footstep on the gravel path, badly neglected since the War, and overgrown with patches of rafia, had first reached Lady Wastwood's ears. Now a man—recognised by Katharine and her friend as the dapper French-speaking Italian chauffeur who had driven them from Alexandria three days previously, in the Daimler car belonging to Essenian, stepped from the trellised shade of a path into the light of the rose-wreathed doorway, and saluting the ladies without speaking, held out a letter to Katharine.

News....

Something in Katharine's bosom leaped.... She felt stifled, as though the fretted, sun-flecked walls of the Khedive's rose-pavilion were those of a brick-built prison, impervious to light and air. But with an effort she mastered herself, and took the offered letter—hoping the Italian did not note the trembling of her hand.

It was a square heliotrope envelope, violently scented with some clinging Eastern perfume that revolted Katharine. The address to "Miss Forbis, Convalescent Hospital, The Palace, Montana," was typed in vivid violet ink. Unwilling to open the letter in the presence of a stranger, Katharine hesitated, looking at the Italian:

"Is there any reply to this? ..."

Lady Wastwood had spoken. The Italian answered in his nasal French, looking at Katharine:

"The car is waiting.... If Mademoiselle would read!"

Katharine, conscious of the unsteadiness of her hands, opened the type-addressed envelope. The sheet of paper it contained bore this message:

"Come at once. Urgent! J. H."

The four-word message and the initials beneath were typed in violet ink. Underneath was an impression in coarse green sealing-wax of the onyx signet-ring....

Katharine was silent, mastering her deep excitement. That green seal seemed to burn through her eyes and sear her brain as she stared at it. Again she heard John Hazel saying:

"Suppose I were ever to send a line saying 'Come at once!' ... Well, don't come!—unless the paper bears an impression of this, in sealing-wax, or clay, or bread or mud.... And test it by the ring you wear, before you accept it...."

The test could be made at once. She glanced at the signet on her left hand and then at the Italian chauffeur. His round, black eyes were fixed on her, watching her eagerly. She spoke to the man in quiet, level tones:

"I will come in a few minutes. Be good enough to wait for me...."

"As Mademoiselle desires." The Italian's bird-bright eyes snapped excitedly. "I will go back and wait for her. But—" he shrugged and spread his olive hands, "we have a long way to go. Mademoiselle understands that, naturally...."

"I understand, and I will come in five minutes," Katharine said, with her tone of calm authority.

"My dear—" Lady Wastwood asked anxiously, as the Italian saluted, wheeled and went out of the pavilion: "You've had news!—I see it in your face."

"No news!" Katharine said. "But a summons, most certainly." Days previously, she had taken a careful impression in scarlet sealing-wax of the relievo head of Hercules upon her black onyx signet. Now she took from her cigarette-case the card bearing the impression, and laying the letter on the marble table the pavilion contained, placed the card face downwards over the green seal on the heliotrope paper. The surfaces of paper and card met and wedded, as the green relievo sank into the scarlet intaglio, and the two Hercules' heads became one.

"I'm fearfully impressed." Trixie's eyes were circular with interest and curiosity. "But what on earth is that for? ..."

"Just to make sure," Katharine said, turning away, "that the message that says, 'Come At Once. Urgent!' is really from John Hazel. Now I must go. I've a suit-case ready packed in our sleeping-tent, and the Commandant has been prepared against my being called suddenly away. As for the duty, Molly Lyne-Soames carries on instead of me. She's prepared—a regular brick of a girl!—and so—this until you next hear from me!" She caught the astonished Trixie in a warm embrace, kissed her thin cheeks and left a tear on one of them. "God bless you, you kindest of women!" she called, turning on the threshold of the rose-pavilion to wave her hand. "And so good-bye, until we meet again!"

And flushed and radiant, Katharine was gone, taking with her in her haste a trail of a thorny climbing rose that had clung to her as though to keep her, and leaving its crimson petals scattered on the stone. As her light hurried footsteps died away—a little puff of the westerly breeze swept the card and the heliotrope letter, with their green and red seals, off the marble table to the floor—and hurried them into a corner as though their work were done.