mind.

"I wonder what Windlehurst would think of it. He always had an eye for
things like that," she murmured; and then caught her breath, as she
added: "He always liked beauty." She looked at her wrinkled, childish
hands. "But sunsets never grow old," she continued, with no apparent
relevance. "La, la, we were young once!"

Her eyes were lost again in the pinkish glow spreading over the grey-
brown sand of the desert, over the palm-covered island near. "And now
it's others' turn, or ought to be," she murmured.

She looked to where, not far away, Hylda stood leaning over the railing
of the dahabieh, her eyes fixed in reverie on the farthest horizon line
of the unpeopled, untravelled plain of sand.

"No, poor thing, it's not her turn," she added, as Hylda, with a long
sigh, turned and went below. Tears gathered in her pale blue eyes. "Not
yet--with Eglington alive. And perhaps it would be best if the other
never came back. I could have made the world better worth living in if
I had had the chance--and I wouldn't have been a duchess! La! La!"

She relapsed into reverie, an uncommon experience for her; and her mind
floated indefinitely from one thing to another, while she was half
conscious of the smell of coffee permeating the air, and of the low
resonant notes of the Nubian boys, as, with locked shoulders, they
scrubbed the decks of a dahabieh near by with hempshod feet.

Presently, however, she was conscious of another sound--the soft clip of
oars, joined to the guttural, explosive song of native rowers; and,