For a moment the sphinx, held at an angle between her hands, regarded her calmly, and the corners of its mouth seemed ever so slightly indented in a smile. “You could tell me everything, if you only would,” she rebuked it aloud, and set it down again with a lingering hand.

He had left the room so suddenly, or had been so sure that he was coming back soon, that his pipe still lay beside a tobacco pouch at the edge of the blotter, and there was still burnt-out tobacco in the bowl. She picked up the pipe and sniffed it daintily, and then held it a moment in her hand, liking the feel of the smooth brown wood. One of the man’s most cherished and intimate possessions, it drew a sense of his very presence all about her, till she half expected the touch of his hand on her shoulder, or the sound of his voice at the door. Reluctantly, she laid it down exactly as it had been. Of all the things he had left behind, it looked loneliest, and forlorn.

There was one thing more she wanted to do before she left the desk. Its closed drawers were of course inviolate. But the book-blotter—people sometimes left letters in a blotter like this one—it had a lid of simple tooled leather—if there should be just an envelope addressed to him....

With cautious fingertips she raised the lid, and let it fall again, with a guilty glance over her shoulder. There was something in the blotter. The sphinx seemed to be watching her with its wise near-smile.

Defiantly once more she lifted the lid of the blotter and it dropped back open, exposing a closely written sheet with a signature, and another unfinished page which must be his reply, in his own handwriting. The letter written to him began: My dear Shenstone—and was signed Walter Thompson. The letter he had begun in reply to My dear Thompson was dated June 5, 1936— and had never got as far as a signature.

Sabrina scowled down at it with vexation. It was as though he was determined to thwart her. It was as though he teased her willfully.

A glance at the waste paper basket showed that it had been emptied, and Thompson’s envelope was gone.

Defeat....

CHAPTER TWO

—WITH rifles and ammunition, ready to move within a week’s time. The Mullah was at X, the stores at Y. Dalton knows the rest.

He signed his name and the date with a very unsteady hand—Hilary Shenstone, June 5, 1938—on the last of those precious pages; figures and diagrams and a hasty map in pencil on a few smudged leaves torn from a pocket notebook. And a hot wind scattered sand across the ink as it dried.