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Show III SIR CLAUDE went to bed, of course. He always did what his wife told him to do. Lady Wyverne tucked him up, and then, followed by the familiar sound of his first snore, went out onto the veranda beneath which the young Spahi was standing. He heard the rustle of her gown above him in the still night, and smiled. Brilliant stars sparkled in the sky, and the thread of road that wound through the gorge to the Sahara was lit up by a round, white moon. In the the landlady, her family, and servants were supping cheerully. Nobody was about. After a minute the Spahi moved away from the pillar against which he had been leaning, to the wooden railing beneath the Judas-trees, which divided the small, paved court-yard of the inn from the road. He turned and stood ~with his back against it, facing the veranda, but he did not look up. - Standing there motionless, he ap-peared to be wrapped in a profound reverie. Lady Wyverne watched him curiously. His large, white turban looked ghostly in the moonlight, she thought. Why did he stand there motionless? Of what could he . I be thinking? This place, so unlike Qlll\1 any place she had ever before seen, ril f puzzled her. This motionless man puzzled her, too. The frivolity of her spirit was led captive by this African solitude in the night, on the edge of a greater solitude, the vast 1 and unknown desert in which this man who stood like a statue beneath |