"It's stopped," she said. He unfastened his from his wrist and handed it to her. "Wouldn't you like a sleep yourself," he suggested. "Oh, no!" she said. He threw himself down in the shade of the tamarisk, and, leaning on his elbow, glanced at her for a moment doubtfully. "It's only to be an hour," he reminded her; "not what you think I want." "You're going to be called at three," she said precisely. He smiled at her little air of responsibility as he laid his head down upon his arm, and she, seeing that he had nothing on which to rest it, got up quickly and fetched him a pillow from her doolie. "Why didn't you ask me for it," she said reproachfully. He took it from her with another smile. "I'm so unused to the luxury of being looked after by a lady." But he gave her hand a clasp which meant a good deal more to it than gratitude. Rose Chantry sat almost motionless during the hour which followed, in that happy sort of preoccupation which is outside of time. She had strapped on Terrington's watch, to feel the loose shackle of it about her thin wrist, and looked now and again at its face with startled consciousness, unaware if minutes or hours had gone by since her last inspection. The valley lay oppressively silent in the fierce heat. The mirage had eaten up its northern end, and the close-set precipices had melted into an open space of air, which showed, with the strangest effect of disappearance, nothing beyond. Thin blue threads of smoke stretched up to heaven from the forsaken camp fires, and the mules which had come back from watering floundered in the dust; but nothing else seemed to move between those walls of stone except the ceaseless waver of the heated air. Terrington slept without stirring; his lips set as firmly as when he was awake, his lids closed like a mask in bronze, as if rather with determination than from drowsiness. Rose could not help comparing the strong guarded look of his sleeping face with the flaccid abandonment of Lewis Chantry's, who always slumbered with his mouth open and his eyelids half apart. At three she leant over and put her finger upon his arm, and his eyes opened quiet and wide awake as though she had touched the spring of his consciousness. He rose at once, whistled for his horse, was in the saddle three minutes later, and riding, a solitary figure, up the gray road of the stony valley towards the bridge. Rose Chantry watched till the undulating outlines of both horse and rider were dissolved in the distorting glare, with a feeling in her heart which no man before had ever brought there. IX An hour later Terrington returned, and the march recommenced. The bridge had been strengthened, but even so it looked perilous enough, and Rose, after seeing one of the mules lurch over and burst to a pulp on the rocks beneath, preferred to walk across with a rope about her than to be carried in the doolie.