The Sheik

"Oh yes. He and my father became great friends. He often stays with us in Paris. We are a link between him and Ahmed. He is always hungry for any news of him, and still clings to the hope that one day he will relent. He has never made any further effort to open up relations with him because he knows it would be useless. If there is to be any rapprochement between them it must come from Ahmed. They have almost met accidentally once or twice, and Glencaryll has once seen him. It was at the opera. He was staying in Paris for some months and had a box. I had gone across from our own box on the other side of the house to speak to him. There were several people with him. I was standing beside him, talking. Ahmed had just come into our box opposite and was standing right in the front looking over the theatre. Something had annoyed him and he was scowling. The likeness was unmistakable. Glencaryll gave a kind of groan and staggered back against me. 'Good God! Who is that?' he said, and I don't think he knew he was speaking out loud.

"A man next him looked in the direction he was looking and laughed. 'That's the Saint Huberts' wild man of the desert. Looks fierce, doesn't he? The women call him "le bel Arabe." He certainly wears European clothes with better grace than most natives. He is said to have a peculiar hatred of the English, so you'd better give him a wide berth, Glencaryll, if you don't want to be bow-stringed or have your throat cut, or whatever fancy form of death the fellow cultivates in his native habitat. Raoul can tell you all about him.'

"There was not any need for me to tell him. Fortunately the opera began and the lights went down, and I persuaded him to go away before the thing was over."

Diana gave a little shiver. She felt a great sympathy coming over her for the lonely old man, hoping against hope for the impossible, that she had not felt earlier in the evening. He, too, was wearing his heart out against the inflexible will of Ahmed Ben Hassan.

She shivered again and turned back into the tent with Saint Hubert. They halted by the couch and stood for a long time in silence. Then Diana slowly raised her head and looked up into Raoul's face, and he read the agonised question in her eyes.

"I don't know," he said gently. "All things are with Allah."

CHAPTER X

The night grew hotter and the atmosphere more oppressive. Wrapped in a thin silk kimono Diana lay very still on the outside of the wide couch in the inner room, propped high with pillows that the shaded light of the little reading-lamp beside her might fall on the book she held, but she was not reading.

It was Raoul's latest book, that he had brought with him, but she could not concentrate her mind on it, and it lay idle on her knee—while her thoughts were far away. It was three months since the night that Saint Hubert had almost given up hope of being able to save the Sheik's life—a night that had been followed by days of suspense that had reduced Diana to a weary-eyed shadow of her former vigorous self, and had left marks on Raoul that would never be effaced. But thanks to his great strength and splendid constitution the Sheik had rallied and after the first few weeks convalescence had been rapid. When the terrible fear that he might die was past it had been a wonderful happiness to wait on him. With the determination to live for the moment, to which she had forced herself, she had banished everything from her mind but the joy of being near him and of being necessary to him. It had been a very silent service, for he would lie for hours with closed eyes without speaking, and something that she could not master kept her tongue-tied in his presence when they were alone. Only once he had referred to the raid. As she bent over him to do some small office his fingers closed feebly round her wrist and his eyes, with a searching apprehension in them, looked into hers for the first time since the night when she had fled from his curses.

"Was it—in time?" he whispered slowly, and as she nodded with crimson cheeks and lowered eyes he turned his head away without another word, but a shudder that he was too weak to control shook him.