desert; but they were few. Oft-repeated, they would have filled him with
an agitated melancholy impossible to be borne in the life which must be
his.

So it had been. The deeper into life and its labours and experiences he
had gone, the greater had been his temptations, born of two passions, one
of the body and its craving, the other of the heart and its desires: and
he had fought on--towards the morning.

"Is there none that thou lovest so, and that will love thee to mortal
sorrow, if thou goest without care to thy end too soon?" The desert, the
dark monastery, the acacia tree, the ancient palm, the ruinous garden,
disappeared. He only saw a face which smiled at him, as it had done 'by
the brazier in the garden at Cairo, that night when she and Nahoum and
himself and Mizraim had met in the room of his house by the Ezbekieh
gardens, and she had gone out to her old life in England, and he had
taken up the burden of the East--that long six years ago. His head
dropped in his hands, and all that was beneath the Quaker life he had led
so many years, packed under the crust of form and habit, and regulated
thought, and controlled emotion, broke forth now, and had its way with
him.

He turned away staggering and self-reproachful from the first question,
only to face the other--"And that will love thee to mortal sorrow, if
thou goest without care to thy end too soon." It was a thought he had
never let himself dwell on for an instant in all the days since they had
last met. He had driven it back to its covert, even before he could
recognise its face. It was disloyal to her, an offence against all that
she was, an affront to his manhood to let the thought have place in his
mind even for one swift moment. She was Lord Eglington's wife--there