the monsters in whose power she
was. The selfish ingrate! he drew not his scimiter to defend her--he no
longer remembered all the tender love she bore him--but, appalled by the
menace of the bowstring, backed by the warrant of the sultan's signet
ring, he lay groveling on the rich Persian carpet, giving vent to his
alarms by low and piteous groans.

Then he heard the door once more close as softly as possible: he looked
up--glared with wild anxiety around--and breathed more freely on finding
himself alone! For the Ethiopians had departed with their victim! Slowly
rising from his supine posture, Ibrahim approached the table, filled a
crystal cup with sherbet to the brim, and drank the cooling beverage,
which seemed to go hissing down his parched throat--so dreadful was the
thirst which the horror of the scene just enacted had produced.

Then the sickening as well as maddening conviction struck to his very
soul, that though the envied and almost worshiped vizier of a mighty
empire--having authority of life and death over millions of human
beings, and able to dispose of the governments and patronage of huge
provinces and mighty cities--he was but a miserable, helpless slave in
the eyes of another greater still--an ephemeron whom the breath of
Solyman the Magnificent could destroy! And overcome by this conviction,
he threw himself on the sofa, bursting into an agony of tears--tears of
mingled rage and woe. Yes; the proud, the selfish, the haughty renegade
wept as bitterly as ever even a poor, weak woman was known to weep!

* * * * *

How calm and beautiful lay the waters of the Golden Horn beneath the
light of that lovely moon which shone so chastely and so serenely above,
as if pouring its argent luster upon a world where no evil passions were
known--no hearts were stained with crime--no iniquity of human imagining
was in the course of perpetration. But, ah! what sound is that which
breaks on the silence of the night! Is it the splash of oars? No--for
the two black slaves who guide yon boat which has shot out from the
shore into the center of the gulf, are resting on the slight sculls--the
boat itself, too, is now stationary--and not a ripple is stirred up by
its grotesquely-shaped prow. What, then, was that sound?

'Twas the voice of agony bursting from woman's throat; and the boat is
about to become the scene of a deed of horror, though one of
frequent--alas! too frequent--occurrence in