t flags, which, sluiced with
water from the well, exhaled a slight but grateful coolness. Heywood
stooped above the quivering flame, lighted a cigar, and sinking loosely
into a chair, blew the smoke upward in slow content.

"Luxury!" he yawned. "Nothing to do, nothing to fret about, till the
compradore reports. Wonderful--too good to be true."

For a long time, lying side by side, they might have been asleep.
Through the dim light on the white walls dipped and swerved the drunken
shadow of a bat, who now whirled as a flake of blackness across the
stars, now swooped and set the humbler flame reeling. The flutter of his
leathern wings, and the plash of water in the dark, where a coolie still
drenched the flags, marked the sleepy, soothing measures in a nocturne,
broken at strangely regular intervals by a shot, and the crack of a
bullet somewhere above in the deserted chambers.

"Queer," mused Heywood, drowsily studying his watch. "The beggar puts
one shot every five minutes through the same window.--I wonder what he's
thinking about? Lying out there, firing at the Red-Bristled Ghosts. Odd!
Wonder what they're all"--He put back his cigar, mumbling. "Handful of
poor blackguards, all upset in their minds, and sweating round. And all
the rest tranquil as ever, eh?--the whole country jogging on the same
old way, or asleep and dreaming dreams, perhaps, same kind of dreams
they had in Marco Polo's day."

The end of his cigar burned red again; and again, except for that, he
might have been asleep. Rudolph made no answer, but lay thinking. This
brief moment of rest in the cool, dim courtyard--merely to lie there
and wait--seemed precious above all other gain or knowledge. Some quiet
influence, a subtle and profound conviction, slowly was at work in him.
It was patience, wonder, steady confidence,--all three, and more. He had
felt it but this once, obscurely; might die without knowing it in
clearer fashion; and yet could never lose it, or forget, or come to any
later harm. With it the stars, above the dim vagaries of the bat, were
brightly interwoven. For the present he had only to lie ready, and wait,
a single comrade in a happy army.

Through a dark little door came Miss Drake, all in white, and moving
quietly, like a symbolic figure of evening, or the genius of the place.
Her hair shone duskily as she bent beside the candle, and with steady
fingers tilted a vial, from which amber drops fell slowly into a glass.
With dark ey