Suddenly, to the trained far-seeing eyes sweeping that cheerless waste hungrily, appeared a faint speck of color on one of the sand dunes at the base of the Sphinx. With eyes fixed unwaveringly upon it he put the barb at full speed. What he would do, what he would say--all hesitation dropped away in his fierce desire to look into her eyes once more, to hear that sweet voice again, though it were only to send him hurtling down into the hell of his deserts.
Grace Carter, sitting alone in the carriage, watched listlessly the rest of her party kodaking at a distance the immobile face of the Great Mystery. But she saw them as in a dream and ere long she was looking, with a heart as old and cold and dead as that of the grim Mistress of the Nile, as far and unseeingly into the west as the Sphinx stared into the east.
Before her fast-misting eyes blazed one line in Constance's letter:
"For God's sake, play with happiness no more!"
It would be easy to obey that prayer, she thought bitterly, for never more would happiness come anigh her. Afar in the desert a sand spout flared up, whirled along feverishly for a few minutes, and was gone. She watched it with a strange fascination and muttered brokenly:
"Just like his love, fierce, threatening, grand and evanescent. And yet I was to blame! Oh, why did I ever let him go?"
The twanging of some stringed instrument in one of the Bedouin black tents clustered about the base of the Sphinx woke a long-forgotten chord and she mechanically crooned the words of a song that once wailed a heart misery as great as hers:
"'Could you come back to me, Douglass, Douglass, Back with the old-time smile that I knew? I'd be so faithful and loving, Douglass! Douglass, Douglass, tender and true!
Her voice broke and she buried her face in her hands, her form convulsed by a paroxysm of tears. Then to her numbed senses came vaguely another remembrance of the buried past, frantic hoof-beats. For a second she cowered as she had done on that awful day, then she turned with a sigh of relief to welcome, this time, the end of all things. Through her tear-blinded eyes she saw the blue stallion sweeping down upon her but she never flinched. God was going to be kind after all.