"I should be myself at last. You’ll find that dangerous. A desert night would set me free. Perhaps I should find a nature very old and abandoned—" "In me?" "In myself." "Suppose you should hear the cries?" Anna Erivan laughed. "There would be no Forward Room out here. It is the houses and the presence of men that make me afraid." ... He did not care much to speak, but regarded her face as he had never used his eyes before. Several times during the morning, she had reverted in her talk to incidents of the night before, when he lay in exhaustion, with only a waver of consciousness from time to time. "Did you know that a woman finding her beloved, looks for a man but finds a child?" Romney peered closer, his eyelids all but shut in the vivid light. "This morning as the dawn came in, I saw the child so clearly that I had to touch your face. I would have wept had I not run away for a little time." After a moment, she added in whispers and falterings: "Did you know, toward morning, but before the light—when the cold came in—that I was very close to you, leaning forward under the edge of your blanket? ... You were still. Your breathing was like a child’s. And then I thought again of your coming in the evening to the court—to the west wall. I don’t know how I could have been so hard. I should have broken down in fright, had you not come." "I only knew that I could not leave you," he said. "But to-morrow morning—" He was silent. "We need not think of it now," she said slowly. "Not until to-night. We shall know best to-night—" She was staring away into the gilded mountains of cloud in the low west. Romney’s eyes followed hers. There seemed a movement there, something filmy white like a great bird, against the brilliant horizon. He could not get his mind away from Wampli. Every moment with her, and the parting seemed harder. The larger consciousness that had come from her, at the same time bound him to her.... Leaving her in Nadiram—alone under the Russian flag. It would take seven days at least to get back, even if his mission made it possible for him to remain as short a time as a day in Wampli. That was not likely. The chances were, if he were not held there, his orders would be to push on. The last packet of orders, designated for reading in Wampli, might contain the open orders for a farther journey of weeks. Romney shivered. There was little mercy in the facts. The great continent of Asia was like a dead weight against him. She touched his arm. "Look—"