At last Raoul had announced that his visit could be protracted no longer and that he must resume his journey to Morocco. He was going up to Oran and from there to Tangier by coasting steamer, collecting at Tangier a caravan for his expedition through Morocco. His decision once made he had speeded every means of getting away with a despatch that had almost suggested flight. To Diana his going meant the hastening of a crisis that could not be put off much longer. The situation was becoming impossible. She had said good-bye to him the night before. She had never guessed the love she had inspired in him, and she wondered at the sadness in his eyes and his unaccustomed lack of words. He had wanted to say so much and he had said so little. She must never guess and Ahmed must never guess, so he played the game to the end. Only that night after she had left them the voices sounded in the adjoining room for a very short time. And this morning he and Ahmed Ben Hassan had ridden away at daybreak. She had not been asleep; she had heard them go, and almost she wished Raoul back, for with his presence the vague fear that assailed her seemed further away. The camp had seemed very lonely and the day very long. She had ridden with Gaston, and hurried over her solitary dinner, and since then she had been waiting for the Sheik to come back. In what mood would he come? Since Raoul's announcement of his departure he had been more than usually taciturn and reserved. The book she held slipped at length on to the floor, and she let it he unheeded. The usual stillness of the desert seemed to-night unusually still-sinister even--and the silence was so intense that the sudden squeal of a stallion a little distance away made her start with madly racing heart Earlier in the evening a tom-tom had been going persistently in the men's lines, and later a native pipe had shrilled thinly in monotonous cadence; but she had grown accustomed to these sounds; they were of nightly occurrence and they soothed rather than irritated her, and when they stopped the quiet had become intensified to such a degree that she would have welcomed any sound. To-night her nerves were on edge. She was restless and excited, and her thoughts were chaos.