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Show voice of the desert. And in this desert man she personified the desert for the moment. To-morrow the vision would have faded from her eyes and the voice would have died away forever from her ears. Once more she would have resumed her life with Crumpet. Her sense of resentment against her husband, too, restrained her resentment from falling on another. In answer to her pretence of rebuke he was suddenly silent. They walked on very slowly. She heard the tap of her high-heeled shoes on the hard road, and thought of the tap of the shoes on the trottoirs of Paris. Then she thought of the look of the Spahi's naked feet, that had seemed to clasp the river stones like hands, of how she had dreamed of those padding softly over the desert with a woman's feet beside ••• Well, now a treading beside the desert. For a moment she gave herself up to an imagination. She conceived. __ the impossible accomplished. Sup- ~ pose she had allowed her caprice 1 develop; suppose she were a - strong, unbalanced, passionate, less woman, instead of merely a whimsical, pleasure-loving, wilful little creature! Suppose she had been carried away, had gone mad over the Spahi! Suppose that they were really afoot for the great journey, that the · 1\U past was left behind forever, hidden a I !ike a dropped burden among the Rlr'!l rocks of the gorge, that the desert was ~~ opening o~t before them and that she .Jl had cast m her lot with the dark · people of the waste places of the earth! , How extraordinary that would be! ~~ For the moment her feather-headed ' caprice delighted in this imagination, ,., |
