Whatever lay before, now, for this one hour, for this moment of meeting he should be hers.

But meet him, where?
Before all the world, with a smile of conventional welcome on her lips, with the same hand-clasp that any friend and lover of humanity would give him?
The desert air blew on her face, keen, sweet, vibrant, thrilling.

What he had heard that night at the monastery, the humming life of the land of white fire--the desert, the million looms of all the weavers of the world weaving, this she heard in the sunlight, with the sand rising like surf behind her horse's heels.

The misery and the tyranny and the unrequited love were all behind her, the disillusion and the loss and the undeserved insult to her womanhood--all, all were sunk away into the unredeemable past.

Here, in Egypt, where she had first felt the stir of life's passion and pain and penalty, here, now, she lost herself in a beautiful, buoyant dream.