much sand in the air, even after it had passed, as to spread an uncanny darkness over everything.

The exodus of refugees seemed as if it would never cease. There were camels weighted with huge packages of carpets and sometimes even furniture; there were donkeys, one I remember with an enormous brass cauldron on its back, others carrying women and children, the husband or some male relative walking beside them with a stick, and the groups reminding one one of pictures of the flight of the Holy Family out of Egypt.

I had spent the whole day in walking round from house to house and hut to hut explaining to the inhabitants as well as I could that, if they wished to be freed from the detested Turk, this would be their last chance for some time to come. I had some amusing experiences, especially in a harem into which I trespassed accidentally, and in which I narrowly escaped getting knifed; but that is another story. . . .

After a time I had become so engrossed in seeing Arabs and Armenians depart, and giving them advice as to where to go, also in the removal of sick refugees, that I had almost forgotten about time and the fact that I was in a town about to pass into enemy hands.

Suddenly darkness began to descend quickly, as it always does out East, and menacingly, as though it wished to en

velop the evacuation with confusion. Nearer and nearer down the Amman road came the soft stealthy tramp of the withdrawing columns of infantry. These were the rearguard of the whole force, so that, when they had gone, no defence remained between the town and the Turks. There was nothing left for me to do but to make my departure with them.

By the time I reached the main road the shadowy fours, weary and bent under their packs, but muttering jests in their relief at leaving the uncannily isolated positions that rearguard troops must take up, were flickering almost silently through the streets. I made my way through a gap in the column to the spot where my groom held our two horses on the farther side of the street.

As I came up, he remarked"There's a girl as wants to speak to yer, sir."

"Where?" I asked hurriedly, for there was little time left for conversations.

"Here, sir. She's standin' by you."

The stars and moon had not made their appearance. What was my astonishment, therefore, when a young musical voice started to talk to me out of the darkness in French, made rather rich by the slight drawl and over-accentuated "e" that Eastern people often impart to it. Gradually I found myself caught up in a most astounding tale of passion, intrigue, and hate, the climax of which had taken

place to-day, when the owner of the voice had freed herself from a harem by stabbing its master with "three strokes of a poignard, until he fell back, the villain, on to the floor, dead, dead, dead!"

The voice became agitated, choked with sobs. The tramp of feet had almost subsided. We should have to get on. I told my groom to follow up the infantry, and that I would join him later. Hardly knowing what to do with the girl, I reached out my hand into the darkness and patted her on the back, trying to console her with a few words.

A series of surprises followed this act of mine. The girl's arms suddenly closed round my neck, and her voice sobbed to me to take her away "out of the horror of it all." She was obviously terrified, and had murdered the Arab fellow out of sheer desperation, and she did not want to fall into the hands of the Turks.

I was about to give her some vague answer, when the moon rose and I found myself gazing into eyes so dark as in the silver light to appear jet-black, set in a soft oval face, pale beneath a bronzed olive complexion. No wonder men had fought over this girl. She was like a soft breeze out of the Arabian desert whence she had travelled. And I, who had not seen a beautiful woman for months, had not even spoken to any woman in that land of exile, bent down impulsively to kiss that little red quivering mouth, more as one would kiss a child than anything else. I

stopped, because I saw a look of customary fear grow in her eyes....

All of a sudden there was a big flash near us, more flashes, and a series of detonations. Men came running down the road. These were the Engineers left behind to blow up the remainder of the Turkish ammunition. They had done their work and were clearing off as quickly as possible.

Spurts of flame licked out from different parts of the town, and a continuous crackling like musketry broke from the piles of burning rifle ammunition.

A limber with several men on board, and followed by two officers on horseback, dashed down the street. The officers must have seen me, for they called back, "You had better look out. ... Johnny will be in the town in a minute."

Waiting no longer, I picked up the girl (she was so light), placed her in front of the saddle, and mounted behind her.

A minute later we were careering wildly down the zigzag road. Turning a sudden corner that took us on to a strip of road beneath the town, I looked up to see several flashes overhead. kicked up I thought by the horse's fore-hoof, stung me oruelly in the calf. I experienoed a violent momentary pain, cursed, and then urged on the horse as hard as she could go.

Moments of excitement are apt afterwards to to become blurred in in one's memory.

Strawberry, my mare, kept up a kind of canter for at least ten minutes. We lurched round sudden curves beneath high overhanging rooks, went at the double down bits of road churned into a muddy morass by rain and traffic. How we never plunged off the road and fell down the precipice to the river-bed on our left I do not know, except that Strawberry was always a safe-goer even in the semidarkness.

When I felt we had put enough distance between ourselves and a possible advanced Turkish cavalry patrol, I drew rein hard. Strawberry dropped into a jog-trot.

It was then that I began to feel that the whole affair was unreal. A sensation of drowsiness assailed me, and the Armenian girl, looking more wild and beautiful than ever, as her head rested on my shoulders with her eyes opening and shutting in a halfsleep, the occasional whinnying of the horse, and the weird echoing of the torrent beneath as it thundered through the shadowy gorge roofed over by a bluish sky full of stars and moonlight, seemed nothing more than a dream.

I tried hard to shake off this drowsiness, but was unable to do so. I had to face difficulties ahead, such as the immediate problem of crossing the river at El Howeij a few miles farther on. The bridge would probably have been blown up by now. We should have to oross the stream. Perhaps the stream was mined. . . . That

was unpleasant. But I could not bring myself to face or conquer the difficulty. I seemed to be swimming among the stars, and the blue sky, and a mass of ever-rolling hills. . . The sounds of the horse's hoofs and the torrent beneath persisted in receding to a greater distance, in becoming fainter and fainter. I had, as it were, to keep bringing their noise nearer to me, louder, so as to retain eonsciousness.

Hammer! Hammer! Hammer! On and on we went. Suddenly we turned a bend in the road, and beneath us, just discernible in the darkness, I could see it zigzag down to the river-and over the river lay, yes, still intact, the bridge. Once more I urged Strawberry to a canter; we swung round the "S" curve half-way down the descent, and turned back towards the bridge. In another minute we would be across it and safe. Probably those engineers had told the fellows at the bridge to wait a minute or two for us. had never expected this, otherwise I should not have ambled along so slowly as I had. Anyhow, here was our chance, and we must take it.

I

Perhaps the girl realised this, for she was bending over Strawberry's mane and looking ahead with a strained fixity. Neither of us spoke. It would not have helped.

"Keep it going, old thing," I whispered down to Strawberry's outstretched right ear. "Keep it going. Oop, oop, oop. That's the stuff. Good old horse."

We got down to the bridge in a canter. I reined in Strawberry twenty yards away. She broke into a trot. I pulled her up just in front of it.

I jumped down, intending to lift the girl off the horse and leave her to look after it while I went to look at the bridge. As I reached ground a sudden twinge of pain ran up my calf. I looked down and saw a jagged hole through the puttees on my left leg, out of which came a runlet of blood. Then the bridge, the stream, the mountains on either side of the gorge, and the blue roof of the sky swam round and round and round.

"Il ne faut pas traverser le pont," I managed to gasp out before entering into the land of darkness.

She placed the mouthpiece to my lips and tilted my head back till my eyes looked into the moving panorama of clouds and stars, and the cold water, like elixir descending from the heavens above, poured into me and suffused strength. My mind began to take stock of what had happened. I sat up, looking down to my left leg. The puttees had been taken off.

A white bandage tied tightly gleamed round the calf.

"Wonderful woman," I thought, realising that she had had the presence of mind to look for my field dressing, and the knowledge of how to tie a bandage.

She must have seen the surprise in my face, for she said softly

"I am used to that."

There was a little break in her voice. Her face was now turned towards the moon as she knelt by me, and I distinotly saw tears glittering in her eyes. Suddenly my mind was travelling through the Arabian desert to far-distant Armenia, and glimpses of this young lithe figure, bending over other men by the roadside-father, brothers, a lover, perhaps-flickered before my eyes. It seemed impossible.

I was almost dreaming from sheer exhaustion, I suppose, when a rhythmical beating sound rose out of the road beneath my head. Instinotively my heart started to thump and my brain to work.

I sat up again. Yes; there was no doubt about the matter.

Those were horses' hoofs coming along at a slow trot, but all the same, getting

nearer, nearer, nearer.

The girl was listening intently.

"They are Turkish cavalry," she remarked suddenly.

"How do you know that?" I asked foolishly.

"They are riding Arab horses," she replied.

"But, surely, you can't see them?"

"No, mon ami, I can hear them."

I tottered to my feet. I hardly know how I did it. "We must get the horse," I whispered hurriedly.

She had disappeared into the semi-darkness. In a moment she was back, fear in her eyes. "It has gone. I tied it to an ash-tree twenty yards down the road. It has smashed the branch I tied it to. It has gone." She wrung her hands. "Why couldn't you have tied it to something firmer?" I gasped. I was exasperated. "Strawberry," I shouted; "come here, old girl. Come along, come on, hey, hey, hey."

My voice echoed weirdly round the gorge till it died away, and no sounds remained but the oreaking of the orickets all around us and the loudening horse-hoofs beating down the road.

Strawberry must havestrayed back along the road. She could not have crossed the bridge, otherwise we should have seen her. My brain worked quickly. There was nothing for it but to descend into the river-bed, walk down

it as far as we could and conceal ourselves. After that? Well, after that everything was uncertain.

We stumbled into the stream beneath the bridge. The cold water buoyed me up, kept me going. The girl supported me on my left side. Her arm was round my waist. She was astoundingly strong.

We must have got nearly two hundred yards yards down stream when she pointed to the left side.

"Let us stay here," she suggested. "It is a good spot.'

A minute later I was lying back exhausted, with unpleasant twinges in my left leg, on a soft strip of grassy ground just above the stream. The sound of horses' hoofs thundered over the bridge, died away, and came on again along the road at the top of the precipice at whose foot we lay. Then it disappeared altogether.

"Gone," I sighed in relief. "Thank God for that, anyhow."

We were now in enemy territory, but at least they hadn't scented us out so far.

I felt a hand nestle into mine. I grasped it olose, saying

"Meroi, mon camarade."

As I began to sink into sleep, the picture on which my eyes closed was that of a draped figure, surmounted by a wild yet innocent-looking, beautiful yet sad face, sitting intent.

We were alone, my comrade and I, shut off from our friends,