Ryder's lithe strength was swift. There was one breathless moment of
pursuit, then his hand fell with gripping fierceness upon the
huddled dark figure that had sped so frantically to the tiny door in
the garden's end.... A moment more and she would have been through.

His hand on her shoulder turned her towards him. Her eyes met his
with a dash of desperation.... He was unconscious how his own were
blazing ... how queerly white his face had gone under its desert
brown.

She was actually running away. She had meant never to see him again.
He had frustrated her, but the blow she had meant to deal him was
still felt.

His voice, when it came, sounded shaken.

"You were going to leave me?"

Strangely her eyes changed. The defiance, the panic fear, faded. A
cloud of slow despair welled up in them.

"What else?" she said very softly.

He did not lose his hold on her. He drew her back into the shadows
with involuntary caution, and he felt her slender body trembling in
his grasp. The tremors seemed to pass into his own.

A sense of urgency was pressing upon him. He was not himself, not
any self that he had known. He stood there, in the Egyptian night,