en motioned to Gervaise to take off his slippers.
The door was opened by the Arab himself.

"Enter," he said courteously, and led Gervaise into an apartment where
a lady and two girls were sitting on a divan. They were slightly veiled;
but, as Gervaise afterwards learnt, Ben Ibyn was not a Moor, but a
Berber, a people who do not keep their women in close confinement as
do the Moors, but allow them to go abroad freely without being entirely
muffled up.

"Khadja," the merchant said, "this is the Christian slave I purchased
today. You have for a long time desired one, but not until now have I
found one who would, I thought, satisfy your expectations. What think
you of him?"

"He is a noble looking youth truly, Isaac, with his fair, wavy hair, his
grey eyes, and white skin; truly, all my neighbours will envy me such
a possession. I have often seen Christian slaves before, but they have
always been broken down and dejected looking creatures; this one bears
himself like a warrior rather than a slave."

"He is a warrior; he is one of those terrible knights of Rhodes whose
very name is a terror to the Turks, and whose galleys are feared even
by our boldest corsairs. He must be of approved valour, for he was
commander of one of these galleys."

The girls looked with amazement at Gervaise. They had often heard tales
of the capture of ships that had sailed from Tripoli, by the galleys
of the Christian knights, and had pictured those fierce warriors as of
almost supernatural strength and valour. That this youth, whose upper
lip was but shaded with a slight moustache, should be one of them,
struck them as being almost incredible.

"He does not look ferocious, father," one of them said. "He looks
pleasant and good tempered, as if he could injure no one."

"And yet this morning, daughter, he braved, unarmed, the anger of Hassan
the corsair, on the deck of his own ship; and when the pirate called
upon his men to seize him he threw one overboard, struck two more on to
the deck, and it needed eight men to overpower him."

"I hope he won't get angry with us!" the younger girl exclaimed.
Gervaise could not suppress a laugh, and then, turning to the merchant,
said in Turkish, "I must ask your pardon for having concealed from you
my knowledge of your tongue. I kept the secret from all on board the
corsair, and meant to have done the same here, deeming that if none knew
that I spoke the language it would greatly aid me should I ever