The Sheik | Page 5

all that the most modern woman
may say. I have never obeyed any one in my life; I do not wish to try
the experiment. I am very sorry to have hurt you. You've been a
splendid pal, but that side of life does not exist for me. If I had thought
for one moment that my friendship was going to hurt you I need not
have let you become so intimate, but I did not think, because it is a
subject that I never think of. A man to me is just a companion with

whom I ride or shoot or fish; a pal, a comrade, and that's just all there is
to it. God made me a woman. Why, only He knows."
Her quiet, even voice stopped. There had been a tone of cold sincerity
in it that Arbuthnot could not help but recognise. She meant everything
that she said. She said no more than the truth. Her reputation for
complete indifference to admiration and her unvarying attitude towards
men were as well known as her dauntless courage and obstinate
determination. With Sir Aubrey Mayo she behaved like a younger
brother, and as such entertained his friends. She was popular with
everybody, even with the mothers of marriageable daughters, for, in
spite of her wealth and beauty, her notorious peculiarities made her
negligible as a rival to plainer and less well-dowered girls.
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.
For a moment there was utter stillness, then Diana lay back with a little
sigh. "The Kashmiri Song. It makes me think of India. I heard a man
sing it in Kashmere last year, but not like that. What a wonderful voice!
I wonder who it is?"
Arbuthnot looked at her curiously, surprised at