e before, to superintend
the construction of the royal pavilion. He ventured to approach her
disguised as a negro beggar, with a palm-branch in his hand. She gave him
some money and questioned him concerning his native country, for she made
it her business to secure the favor even of the meanest; but though she
appeared to take an interest in his answers, she did not recognize him;
now for the first time he felt secure, and the next day he went up to her
again, and told her who he was.

The widow was not unmoved by the frightful alteration in her nephew, and
although she knew that even Ani had decreed that any intercourse with the
traitor was to be punished by death, she took him at once into her
service, for she had never had greater need than now to employ the
desperate enemy of the king and of her son-in-law.

The mutilated, despised, and hunted man kept himself far from the other
servants, regarding the meaner folk with undiminished scorn. He thought
seldom, and only vaguely of Katuti's daughter, for love had quite given
place to hatred, and only one thing now seemed to him worth living
for--the hope of working with others to cause his enemies' downfall, and
of being the instrument of their death; so he offered himself to the
widow a willing and welcome tool, and the dull flash in his uninjured eye
when she set him the task of setting fire to the king's apartments,
showed her that in the Mohar she had found an ally she might depend on to
the uttermost.

Paaker had carefully examined the scene of his exploit before the king's
arrival. Under the windows of the king's rooms, at least forty feet from
the ground, was a narrow parapet resting on the ends of the beams which
supported the rafters on which lay the floor of the upper story in which
the king slept. These rafters had been smeared with pitch, and straw had
been laid between them, and the pioneer would have known how to find the
opening where he was to put in the brand even if he had been blind of
both eyes.

When Katuti first sounded her whistle he slunk to his post; he was
challenged by no watchman, for the few guards who had been placed in the
immediate vicinity of the pavilion, had all gone to sleep under the
influence of the Regent's wine. Paaker climbed up to about the height of
two men from the ground by the help of the ornamental carving on the
outside wall of the palace; there a rope ladder was attached, he
clambered up this, and soon stood on the pa