OCR Text |
Show played with it like a child with a colored ball that floats upward on the wind. She forced herself to live in this dream. Yes, it was so. Her old life was gone forever. She had done the strangest thing that ever woman had done. How they would talk of her in her old haunts, in the boudoirs of Paris and of London, on the race-courses of Newmarket and of Ascot, on the moors of Scotland under the misty tnow1tains! What ·would they say of her ? Did it rna tter? They were nothing to her any more, these friends and acquaintances of the past. Their talk would never again be her talk, nor their fads and their crazes hers. From the tyranof fashion she was forever freed, the changing modes of the hour of life. To the immutable East she was setting her face, to the land that does not change! For the moment she was so much , .. under the influence of her own deliberate imagination that she almost was the woman she thought of, and he, the Spahi, almost became to her that woman's master. Or slave? Which was it? Which would it be? Which would it be? As she asked herself this question she glanced at Benchail.lal with an expression in her eyes which had never been in them before when they had looked at him, an expression of deep inquiry, so feminine and yet so searching that it startled him, and added to her personality a charm that hitherto it had lacked, the fas-cination of mystery. They were . cluse to the opening in the gorge. {!;pj/''! The desert lay before them. Al- / ready in the distance they could see it. Their feet were almost touching the fringes of its vastness, and magnetic wind came sighing to their cheeks. |