Arbuthnot sat in silence. It was hardly likely, he thought bitterly,
that he should succeed where other and better men had failed. He had
been a fool to succumb to the temptation that had been too hard for him
to resist. He knew her well enough to know beforehand what her answer
would be. The very real fear for her safety that the thought of the
coming expedition gave him, her nearness in the mystery of the Eastern
night, the lights, the music, had all combined to rush to his lips
words that in a saner moment would never have passed them. He loved
her, he would love her always, but he knew that his love was as
hopeless as it was undying. But it was men who were men whom she wanted
for her friends, so he must take his medicine like a man.
"May I still be the pal, Diana?" he said quietly.
She looked at him a moment, but in the dim light of the hanging
lanterns his eyes were steady under hers, and she held out her hand
frankly. "Gladly," she said candidly. "I have hosts of acquaintances,
but very few friends. We are always travelling, Aubrey and I, and we
never seem to have time to make friends. We rarely stay as long in one
place as we have stayed in Biskra. In England they call us very bad
neighbours, we are so seldom there. We generally go home for three
months in the winter for the hunting, but the rest of the year we
wander on the face of the globe."
He held her slender fingers gripped in his for a moment, smothering an
insane desire to press them to his lips, which he knew would be fatal
to the newly accorded friendship, and then let them go. Miss Mayo
continued sitting quietly beside him. She was in no way disturbed by
what had happened. She had taken him literally at his word, and was
treating him as the pal he had asked to be. It no more occurred to her
that she might relieve him of her society than it occurred to her that
her continued presence might be distressing to him. She was totally
unembarrassed and completely un-self-conscious. And as they sat silent,
her thoughts far away in the desert, and his full of vain longings and
regrets, a man's low voice rose in the stillness of the night. "Pale
hands I loved beside the Shalimar. Where are you now? Who lies beneath
your spell?" he sang in a passionate, vibrating baritone. He was
singing in English, and yet the almost indefinite slurring from note to
note was strangely un-English. Diana Mayo leaned forward, her head
raised, listening intently, with shining eyes. The voice seemed to come
from the dark shadows at the end of the garden, or it might have been
further away out in the road beyond the cactus hedge. The singer sang
slowly, his voice lingering caressingly on the words; the last verse
dying away softly and clearly, almost imperceptibly fading into
silence.