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
could be no sharing of soul and mind and body and the exquisite devotion
of a life too dear for thought. Nothing that she was to Eglington could
be divided with another, not for an hour, not by one act of impulse; or
else she must be less, she that might have been, if there had been no
Eglington--
An exclamation broke from him, and, as one crying out in one's sleep
wakes himself, so the sharp cry of his misery woke him from the trance of
memory that had been upon him, and he slowly became conscious of Ebn Ezra
standing before him. Their eyes met, and Ebn Ezra spoke:
"The will of Allah be thy will, Saadat. If it be to go to the Soudan, I
am thine; if it be to stay, I am thy servant and thy brother. But whether
it be life or death, thou must sleep, for the young are like water
without sleep.
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