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Page 113
"Look, darling; look!"
And the tears streamed down the girl's face as she flung out her arms.
"_Irja Sooltan_!" she called. "_Irja Sooltan_!"
Her voice carried on the still air like the note of a bell over water.
And the stallion, who had broken from his _sayis_ as he was being led
from the stable in readiness for the sad procession to the river, and
who, terrified at the sight of the burning tents, had rushed on in
search of his master, stopped dead, with his head up and tail and mane
streaming in the wind.
He had not found his master, but he knew the voice that called.
"_Irja Sooltan_!" it came again. "_Irja_! _Irja_!"
And he reared and wheeled in the direction from whence it came, then
raced to where he saw the girl standing.
He stamped, and whinnied, and nuzzled her hand and her shoulder as she
stood in her lover's arms.
"Tell me you will marry me, sweetheart," Ben Kelham was saying, with
one hand on the stallion's bridle. "Say it, Damaris."
She shook her head and looked up piteously, with tears in her wonderful
eyes, as she made a great sacrifice to her honour.
"I can't, Ben," she whispered. "I--I--Oh! I can't tell you--I
haven't--the courage--Oh! Ben, you would never understand------"
He gave a great shout as he leapt to the saddle and took the stallion
back a hundred yards, then wheeled him and raced him back along his
tracks.
"Understand, beloved?" he cried, as he bent as he rushed past her at
full speed and lifted her to the saddle. "There is nothing to
understand." And he turned the stallion as he spoke and headed him
towards the tents. "We will just go back, dear; we will just pass to
say goodbye--together."
And they swept across the desert.
Then he reined in the stallion and sat staring, then whispered, as he
bent and kissed the bonny curls:
"The way out, dear; the way out. Someone is waiting for us."
Stubbornly, heavily, across the desert, with occasional pauses for rest
and investigation of the track of small footprints, and the horizon,
came Wellington.
He was very hot and very thirsty, and it seemed to him that he had been
walking for many days through many, many endless deserts, but he
intended to criss-cross the Sahara, or any other desert, through all
eternity, until he could deliver the book he held between his
formidable teeth to his beloved mistress.
And she slid from the saddle, and knelt, and put her arms around him,
and took the somewhat moist keepsake from him.
She swung up like a bird into her lover's arms and took the reins
whilst he leant right down to lift the dog. But Wellington's great
heart was troubled. He looked up at his mistress and said as plainly
as could be with reproachful eyes. "Two's company," and turned to walk
stubbornly and heavily, back across those many, many deserts to the
tents.
Ben Kelham cheered him on as they thundered past him. "We'll wait for
you, old fellow," he cried, then looked down on the woman he loved.
Her hands were clasped upon the silken bodice where she had pinned the
brooch which had been fashioned in the shape of the Hawk of Egypt.
It was not there.
It had come unfastened as she lay in her grief; she had left it to be
buried so deep just a few days later, when the greatest storm which had
ever been known to sweep the desert piled the sand, the desert's own
cloak, to the height of hills, under which slumbered all those who had
sought peace at her breast; under which, guarded throughout all ages by
his dogs, peacefully slept her son.
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