y, she brushed the
distraction away.

"There is time enough for Aimee. She is not lonely now."

"Not lonely?" he shivered at the cold carelessness of her tone. "I
must get to her quickly then."

"But that is not safe.... A little--later."

Uncomfortably he tried to infuse his glance with innate innocence
and utter lack of understanding.

"I shan't hurt him--if I have the chance," he told her. "I've given
you my word--"

"And I trust you--much." Her gaze sought his in a trifle of
impatience at such simplicity. "But it is not safe for you now....
Later ... By and by."

"You don't want him to have a chance to make love to her, do you?"
said Ryder sharply. "I thought that was the very thing you
_didn't_--"

Her smile was a subtle, confessing caress. "I shall have my
revenge," she murmured, and pressed closer to him again, every
sensuous, sumptuous line of her a challenge and an enticement.

"I give you life," she whispered, very low in her throat. "You give
me, perhaps, an hour--?"

"I _haven't_ an hour," said Ryder very desperately and unhappily.
"Not when Aimee is with that devil--"

It took every thought of Aimee to get the words out.

He felt a brute about it, a low, ungrateful dog. She _had_ given him
life and every fiber in him clamored to save her pride and champion
her caprice.

It seemed so dastardly to wrench away from her now, like some
self-centered Joseph, leaving that beastly stab in her vanity....
And she was a stunning creature, lawless, elemental, hot and cold
like the seventh wind of the inferno....

But it was Aimee who was in his blood like a fever.... Aimee, that
frail white rose of a girl, in her bonds of terror....

He saw the flame in Aziza's eyes. He saw the stiffening of her
defiance, of half-incredulous affront. Then, her form drawn up, her
bared arms outflung, her vivid, painted, furious face challenging
him. "I am not beautiful--like Aimee?" she said in a voice of venom,
and in the English, for double measure, "You not like me--no?"

"You _are_ beautiful and I _do_ like you," Ryder combated, feeling a
bungling fool. And then went on to thrust into that half-second of
suspended fury, a faint breath of appeasing. "But--don't you
see--it's my duty--"

"You go--?" she said clearly.

Even in that moment he had a sharp prescience of the unwisdom of his
rejection. A cold calculator of chance and probabilities would have
reckoned that a half hour of assuagement here would have