fireplace, lighted a match, blew it out, and laid
it on the hearth. David stared at him.

"You have not lighted the fire. It is cold tonight."

Again Hamoud listened in awe to the sound of that voice.

"It is cold," he assented softly, with a shiver.

Still kneeling on the hearth, he contemplated the other as though he
were seeing him now for the first time. The feeble, romantic face
before him was not so pallid as his face; those enlarged, questioning
eyes were not so strange as his eyes. At that stare of undefined alarm
he felt, despite all his jealousy, contempt, and hatred, a twinge of
weakness; he remembered all the other's helpless attitudes that he had
sustained and eased. Of a sudden the habit of protection grappled with
his resolve, and might have conquered, for a time at any rate, had he
not recalled the sufferings of the beloved.

He rose and approached the wheel chair. The newspaper was in his left
hand, half concealed, like a weapon, in the folds of his robe.

He heard a feeble cry:

"What has happened? What has happened?"

"And I who have eaten his bread," thought Hamoud, in sudden shame and
horror.

If only some one would come! But the shadowy perspective of the living
room remained empty; and there was nowhere any sound except the beating
of his heart.

He lifted the bottle containing the solution of arsenic.

"Have not taken any of this?" He pronounced in a tone of suffocation.
"Remember must never take it until Hamoud has dropped it."

He set down the bottle. It fell upon its side. But alas! it did not
break.

"Hamoud! what has happened?"

In mercy, with a violent gesture, with a sensation of sickness, he
thrust the newspaper into David's hands. "Done! No chance to turn
back now!" He rolled the folding doors together behind him and leaned
against them, his face beaded with sweat, panting as if in escaping
that room he had run a mile. He listened. How his heart thumped! He
heard nothing. "Has he the courage, though? Alone with those
thoughts!" Leaning against the door, through which came never a sound,
Hamoud began to weep, for the man whom he had served, for her, and for
himself.

Yes, the Oman stock, cruel and remorseless in its pristine state, had
deteriorated in the lax paradise of Zanzibar; the old impulses were
there, but in abortive form; and the deed that Hamoud's forefathers
would have done less indirectly, and without a twinge, aroused in
Hamoud that pi