water in their skinny, extended throats.  Centuries passed between the enormous knee-stroke of their stride.  And, every night, the sunsets restored the forbidding, graver mood, with their crimson, golden splendour, their strange green shafts of light, then—­sudden twilight that brought the Past upon him with an awful leap.  Upon the stage then stepped the figures of this pair of human beings, chanting their ancient plainsong of incantation in the moonlit desert, and working their rites of unholy evocation as the priests had worked them centuries before in the sands that now buried Sakkara fathoms deep.

Then one morning he woke with a question in his mind, as though it had been asked of him in sleep and he had waked just before the answer came.  “Why do I spend my time sight-seeing, instead of going alone into the Desert as before?  What has made me change?”

This latest mood now asked for explanation.  And the answer, coming up automatically, startled him.  It was so clear and sure—­had been lying in the background all along.  One word contained it: 

Vance.

The sinister intentions of this man, forgotten in the rush of other emotions, asserted themselves again convincingly.  The human horror, so easily comprehensible, had been smothered for the time by the hint of unearthly revelations.  But it had operated all the time.  Now it took the lead.  He dreaded to be alone in the Desert with this dark picture in his mind of what Vance meant to bring there to completion.  This abomination of a selfish human will returned to fix its terror in him.  To be alone in the Desert meant to be alone with the imaginative picture of what Vance—­he knew it with such strange certainty—­hoped to bring about there.

There was absolutely no evidence to justify the grim suspicion.  It seemed indeed far-fetched enough, this connection between the sand and the purpose of an evil-minded, violent man.  But Henriot saw it true.  He could argue it away in a few minutes—­easily.  Yet the instant thought ceased, it returned, led up by intuition.  It possessed him, filled his mind with horrible possibilities.  He feared the Desert as he might have feared the scene of some atrocious crime.  And, for the time, this dread of a merely human thing corrected the big seduction of the other—­the suggested “super-natural.”

Side by side with it, his desire to join himself to the purposes of the woman increased steadily.  They kept out of his way apparently; the offer seemed withdrawn; he grew restless, unable to settle to anything for long, and once he asked the porter casually if they were leaving the hotel.  Lady Statham had been invisible for days, and Vance was somehow never within speaking distance.  He heard with relief that they had not gone—­but with dread as well.  Keen excitement worked in him underground.  He slept badly.  Like a schoolboy, he waited for the summons to an important examination that involved portentous issues, and contradictory emotions disturbed his peace of mind abominably.