and
sanity that had remained to him after his lips had once touched the
exquisite Eastern's.

Under the circumstances the negress was his sole hope and chance; he
pressed her into his service and made her Mercury and mediatrix in one.
She took his messages, sent in the only alphabet the pretty gazelle
could read, i. e. flowers, plotted against her owner with true Eastern
finesse, wrought on the Circassian's tenderness for the Giaour, and her
terrified hatred of her grim lord Omar, and threw herself into the
intrigue with the avidity of all womanhood, be it black or be it white,
for anything on the face of the earth that has the charm of being
forbidden. The affair was admirably _en train_, and Galahad was
profoundly happy; he was deliciously in love,--a pleasant spice as
difficult to find in its full flavor as it is to bag a sand grouse;--and
had an adventure to amuse him that might very likely cost him his head,
and might fairly claim to rise into the poetic. The only reward he
received (or ever got, for that matter) for the Balaclava brush, where
he cut down three gunners, and had a ball put in his hip, had been a
cavil raised by a critic, not there, of doubt whether he had ever
ridden inside the lines at all; but his Circassian would have
recompensed him at once for a score of years of Chersonnesus
campaigning, and unprofessional chroniclers: he was perfectly happy, and
his soft, careless, _couleur de rose_ enjoyment of the paradise was
aggravating to behold,--when one was in Pera, and the heat broiled alive
every mortal thing that wasn't a negro, and Bass was limited, and there
were no Dailies, and one thought even lovingly and regretfully of the
old "beastly shells," that had at least this merit, that they scattered
bores when they burst!

"Old fellow!--want something to do?" he asked me one day. I nodded,
being silent and savage from having had to dance attendance on the
Sultan at an Embassy reception. Peace to his _manes_ now! but I know I
wished him heartily in Eblis at that time.

"Come with me to-night then, if you don't mind a probability of being
potted by a True Believer," went on Leilah Derran's lover, going into
some golden water Soyer had sent me.

"For the big game? Like it of all things; but you know I'm tied by the
leg here."

Galahad laughed. "Oh, I only want you an hour or two. I've got six days'
leave for the pigs and the deer: but the hills won't see much of me, I'm
going to make a raid in