her fear of death.

What ingenuity, Ryder wondered fleetly, had smuggled in the
carpenter for the contrivance, what jewels had gone to the bribing,
what lies had been told!... And what had been the end of it all?

Evidently not the discovery of the opening....

He hoped, with singular intensity, for the safety of the daring
young lovers, that unknown youth whose feet had foreworn the path
for his feet and that dead and gone young girl, who had dared
anything rather than endure the mortal ennui of those hours behind
the veil....

These thoughts all went through him like one thought as he stood
there, his eyes roving about the dim, shadowy room of old divans and
Eastern hangings, and then turning back to the glimmering figure of
its mistress.

She was staring frankly at him, her eyes boldly curious and
examining. They were not dark eyes, he saw now; that had been the
impression given by the kohl about them and the black line of the
brows penciled into one line; they were yellow eyes, golden and
glowing, scornful and lazy-lidded.

As she looked at him, these eyes smiled slowly. She was seeing in
this lover of her rival a singularly delightful looking young man,
for all his dust and disarray, a slender, bronzed, hardy-looking
young man, with dark, disordered hair straying across a white brow,
and audacious, eager eyes in which the fear of death, so lately
glimpsed, had left no daunting reflection.

Slowly she lifted her hand and with deliberate softness put back
that straying hair of his.

"Poor boy," she said slowly in English, and then, smiling ruefully,
she held out her hands for his inspection. The grime of the bricks
had discolored their scented delicacy and he saw bruised finger tips
and a torn nail.

"I'm infernally sorry," he said quickly.

Her smile deepened at his look of concern, as he held, a little
helplessly, the witnesses of her work of rescue which seemed somehow
to stray into his keeping.

"It is nothing--but you--poor boy," she said again, in that English
of which she seemed naively proud.

"If you could give me some water," he suggested, and drank deep
with delight the last drop she brought him from an earthen jar. It
seemed to wash from his throat the taste of that dust and fear.

"I can't begin to thank you," he murmured. "I only wish that I could
do something for you--"

She looked up at him. They were standing close together, their
voices cautiously low.

"Perhaps, yes, you can-