The Sheik

Arbuthnot sat in silence. It was hardly likely, he thought bitterly,

that he should succeed where other and better men had failed. He had

been a fool to succumb to the temptation that had been too hard for him

to resist. He knew her well enough to know beforehand what her answer

would be. The very real fear for her safety that the thought of the

coming expedition gave him, her nearness in the mystery of the Eastern

night, the lights, the music, had all combined to rush to his lips

words that in a saner moment would never have passed them. He loved

her, he would love her always, but he knew that his love was as

hopeless as it was undying. But it was men who were men whom she wanted

for her friends, so he must take his medicine like a man.

"May I still be the pal, Diana?" he said quietly.

She looked at him a moment, but in the dim light of the hanging

lanterns his eyes were steady under hers, and she held out her hand

frankly. "Gladly," she said candidly. "I have hosts of acquaintances,

but very few friends. We are always travelling, Aubrey and I, and we

never seem to have time to make friends. We rarely stay as long in one

place as we have stayed in Biskra. In England they call us very bad

neighbours, we are so seldom there. We generally go home for three

months in the winter for the hunting, but the rest of the year we

wander on the face of the globe."

He held her slender fingers gripped in his for a moment, smothering an

insane desire to press them to his lips, which he knew would be fatal

to the newly accorded friendship, and then let them go. Miss Mayo

continued sitting quietly beside him. She was in no way disturbed by

what had happened. She had taken him literally at his word, and was

treating him as the pal he had asked to be. It no more occurred to her

that she might relieve him of her society than it occurred to her that

her continued presence might be distressing to him. She was totally

unembarrassed and completely un-self-conscious. And as they sat silent,

her thoughts far away in the desert, and his full of vain longings and

regrets, a man's low voice rose in the stillness of the night. "Pale

hands I loved beside the Shalimar. Where are you now? Who lies beneath

your spell?" he sang in a passionate, vibrating baritone. He was

singing in English, and yet the almost indefinite slurring from note to

note was strangely un-English. Diana Mayo leaned forward, her head

raised, listening intently, with shining eyes. The voice seemed to come

from the dark shadows at the end of the garden, or it might have been

further away out in the road beyond the cactus hedge. The singer sang

slowly, his voice lingering caressingly on the words; the last verse

dying away softly and clearly, almost imperceptibly fading into

silence.