she spoke she would blurt out
everything, in obedience to that atrocious command.

All at once she seemed to have flames in her eyes. Everything had
turned the color of gold. She stood with her head thrown back, her
face changed by anguish; then she fled through that golden dazzle. On
the staircase the many-colored rays reached out to hold her, to restore
her to that exquisite transfiguration; she passed through them in a
flash; and indeed they could now have enhanced, instead of beauty, only
the triumph of that element which had made her beauty strange. She
stretched herself upon her couch, on her back, in the attitude of the
dead. She pronounced with an extreme rapidity, in muffled tones:

"I am on the ship----Faster! Faster!"

She uttered a cry that was heard all over the house.

When Hamoud and the servants came running, they found her rigid; but
while they were telephoning for the nearest physician the convulsions
began. Tossing about, she showed intense fear of all who tried to
approach her. The women ran from the room. Hamoud remained, rigid at
the foot of the bed, his face a dingy white, staring before him as one
who meditates on some immense, intolerable injury. When her cries
burst forth, he laid his hand upon his dagger, as if against these
invisible forces, these jinn from the Pit, that had taken possession of
her.

The physician arrived to find the convulsions ended. Hamoud, now
gripping his dagger as if he would presently escape this scene by
plunging the blade into his breast, uttered:

"Dying?"

"It will pass," the physician answered, with a movement of reproof.

Hamoud, afflicted by disbelief, by a despair that swept away his
fatalism, by a fury that called for revenge, bared his teeth and
demanded:

"I shall bring him? We show her to him?"

"Who?"

Hamoud glanced malignantly toward the floor.

"Hardly!"

The physician resumed his contemplation of the patient, who had
descended into a stupor that was to last for days.

CHAPTER L

There was a hush over the house amid the old trees. The servants moved
softly through the corridors, paused to whisper to one another, then
hurried out of sight as David Verne appeared in his wheel chair, slowly
propelled toward the sick room by Hamoud.

She seemed hardly to breathe as she lay in the gloom through which
drifted the white uniforms of the nurses, amid a dim glamour from all
the charming objects that had been meant to pleas