He sat at the bedside, sometimes unable to extend his hand to touch her hand, as though his strength were wholly a reflection of her strength, so that with the latter's waning the former must flicker out. "What is it?" he thought, lost in misery and wonder. The physicians and the nurse looked at him askance, their secret pent in behind their lips. He felt round him the pressure of this secret. The air was full of thoughts that he could not apprehend. Behind the benignant evasiveness of the doctors he seemed to discern a fact, like a thunderbolt withheld. He recoiled from his conjectures, to cower amid these shadows which he felt might be less agonizing than that flash of light. There was no reason for alarm, they told him. And instead of being mysterious it was a perfectly defined case of nerves, hysteria, emotional collapse. Ah, yes; but from what cause? Even Hamoud, he was sure, knew something that he did not know. The Arab, while apparently as solicitous as ever, was changed. He had taken on, merely in his physical aspect, a new quality: he seemed taller than formerly, and older. Amid all his tasks he moved with a sort of feline restlessness. He took to prowling at night, round and round the bleak garden. The robed figure paced the paths with an effect of stealing carefully toward an enemy. In the light from a window his fine profile appeared for an instant like a presentment of vengeance--with something sensual in its look of cruelty. Now and then, in the middle of the night, David became aware that Hamoud had entered the room without a sound, to watch him from the deepest mass of shadows. One could make out only the pale blotch that was his white skullcap, and the long pale streak that was the uncovered portion of his white under robe. The eyes, the expression of the face, were lost in blackness. "I thought you called." And he was gone. In his own room, having noiselessly closed and locked the door, he drew from his bosom the Koran. Holding the book reverently in his small, right hand, he raised his head, and stood waiting with closed eyes for inspiration. Presently, opening the Koran, he read: "The doom of God cometh to pass." This text was the answer to his prayer for guidance? He seated himself by the window, and gazed out into the darkness. He considered piously the wonders of terrestrial life, a succession of accidents all foreordained by God, an apparent drifting that was in fact one steady propulsion by the hand of fate. From the rich, ancestral house of coraline limestone across the sea to strange lands. From dignity to abasement. From loneliness to this faint, delicious fragrance in which the heart dissolved. From a dream of freedom to the service of love through the agency of death. CHAPTER LI It was twilight. David Verne sat in the study, his chin on his breast. Hamoud, appearing in the doorway, gazed round the room. He had a folded newspaper in his hand.