The Sheik

Mindful of her lord's deputy, who was waiting in the next room, and

whom she regarded with awe, Zilah held her ground with a timid

insistence until Diana started up wrathfully and bade her go in tones

that she had never used before to the little waiting-girl. Zilah fled

precipitately, and, thoroughly awakened, Diana swung her heels to the

ground and with her elbows on her knees rested her hot head in her

hands. She felt giddy, her head ached and her mouth was parched and

dry. She got up languidly, and going to the table studied her face in

the mirror intently. She frowned at the reflection. She had never been

proud of her own beauty; she had lived with it always and it had seemed

to her a thing of no consequence, and now that it had failed to arouse

the love she wanted in Ahmed Ben Hassan she almost hated it.

"Are you going to have fever or are you merely bad-tempered?" she asked

out loud, and the sound of her own voice made her laugh in spite of her

heavy heart. She went into the bathroom and soused her head in cold

water. When she came back a frightened Zilah was putting a small tray

on the brass-topped table by the bed.

"M'seiur Gaston," she stammered, almost crying.

Diana looked at the tray, arranged with all the dainty neatness dear to

the valet's heart, and then at the travelling clock on the table beside

it, and realised that it was an hour past her usual lunch-time and that

she was extremely hungry, after all. A little piece of paper on the

tray caught her eye, and, picking it up, she read in Gaston's clear

though minute handwriting, "At what hour does Madame desire to ride?"

The servant clearly had no intention of giving up the programme for the

afternoon without a struggle. She smiled as she added a figure to the

end of the note, and went to the curtains that divided the rooms.

"Gaston!"

"Madame!"

She passed the paper silently through the curtains and went back to her

lunch. When she sent Zilah away with the empty tray she rescued the

Vicomte de Saint Hubert's book from the floor where she had thrown it

and tried to read it dispassionately. She turned to the title-page and

studied the pencilled scrawl "Souvenir de Raoul" closely. It did not

look like the handwriting of a small-minded man, but handwriting was

nothing to go by, she argued obstinately. Aubrey, who was the essence

of selfishness, wrote beautifully, and had once been told by an expert

that his writing denoted a generous love of his fellow-men, which

deduction had aroused no enthusiasm in the baronet, and had given his

sister over to helpless mirth.