holly its smart of outrage.

He felt again the tightening of his nerves, like quivering wires, as
he crossed the violated reception room and entered the boudoir. It
was empty, but on the divan the flickering candle light revealed the
damp, spreading stain where Aimee's drenched satins had been.

He thrust aside a hanging and pushed open the door into the room
beyond.

It was a small bedroom evidently very recently furnished in new and
white shining lacquer of French design, elaborately inlaid with
painted porcelains and draped with a profusion of rosy taffeta.
Among this elegance, surprisingly unrelated to the ancient paneled
walls, stood the hastily opened trunk and bags of the bride, their
raised lids and disarranged trays heaped with the confusion of
unaccustomed, swiftly searching hands.

Aimee herself, in a gay little French boudoir robe of jade and
citron, sat huddled in a chair, like a mute, terrified child, in the
hand of her dresser, who was shaking out the long, damp hair and
fanning it with a peacock fan.

At the bey's entrance Fatima suspended the fanning, but with easy
familiarity exhibited the long ringlets.

Curtly the bey nodded, and gestured in dismissal; the woman laid
down her fan, and with a last slant-eyed look at that strangely
still new mistress she went noiselessly out a small service door.

With an air of negligent assurance Hamdi Bey gazed about the room
and yawned. "Truly a fatiguing evening," he remarked in his dry,
sardonic voice. "But you look so untouched! What a thing is radiant
youth."

He sauntered over to her, who drew a little closer together at his
approach, and lifted one of the long dark curls that the serving
woman had exhibited.

"The ringlets of loveliness," he murmured. "You know the old saying
of the Sadi? 'The ringlets of the lovely are a chain on the feet of
reason and a snare for the bird of wisdom.'... How long ago he said
it--and how true to-day ... Yet such a charming chain! Suppose,
then, I forgive you, little one, since sages have forgiven beauty
before?"

She was silent, her eyes fixed on him with the silent terror with
which a trapped bird sees its captor, in their bright darkness the
same mute apprehension, the same filming of helpless despair.

Ryder was dead, she thought. This cruel, incensed old madman had
killed him, for all his oaths. Somewhere beneath those ancient
stones he was lying drowned and dead, a strange, pitiable addition
to the dark s