t has her body been
recovered?"

"A body has been found and I have seen it. But the limbs are crushed, and
her face is, alas! trampled out of all recognition, although the dress
answers exactly to one that Goliba says his daughter possessed, and in
which I myself saw her. There is, alas! no doubt of her fate. She has
been brutally murdered, and at the instigation of the Naya, who sent
forth her fiendish horde to kill us."

"I knew from the manner you exchanged glances with Liola that you loved
her," I said, after a pause, brief and painful.

"Yes," he answered sadly. "Surreptitiously I had breathed into her ear
words of affection, and had been transported to a veritable paradise of
delight by the discovery that she reciprocated my love. But," he added,
harshly, "my brief happy love-dream is now ended. I must live and work
only for my people; they must be to me both sweetheart and wife. I must
act as my ancestors have done, indulging them and loving them."

Never before, even in the moments when as fellow-adventurers things
looked blackest, had I seen him in so utterly dejected an attitude. The
light had died from his face, and he had suddenly become burdened by a
monarch's responsibilities; prematurely aged by a bitter sorrow that had
sapped all youthful gaiety from his buoyant heart.

With heartfelt sympathy I endeavoured to console him, but all was
unavailing. That he had loved her madly was only too apparent, and it
seemed equally certain that she was dead, for shortly afterwards Goliba
entered, and in a voice full of emotion told us how he had been able to
identify the body, and that his tardy attendance upon his royal master
was due to the fact that he had been superintending her burial.

The old sage's words visibly increased Omar's burden of sorrow, for in
the moonlight I saw a tear trickle down his pale cheek, glistening for an
instant brighter than the jewels upon his robe. Liola had fallen victim
to the inhuman brutality of the Naya's guards, and Mo had thus been
deprived of a bewitchingly handsome queen.

The _denouement_ of this stirring story of a throne was indeed a tragic
one; Goliba had lost his only daughter, the pride of his heart, and Omar
the woman he loved.

The silence that followed was broken by a hasty footstep, and the tall
dark figure of Kona approached.

"A strange fact hath transpired, O Master!" he cried breathlessly,
addressing Omar.

"Speak, tell me," the young Naba exclaimed,