cks and key hole strangely radiant with light.

"He left me, to go to those screams," she was saying rapidly. "I
tried to run that way--and found that woman coming back. And I told
her to wait--in her own room--and I slipped back in there--and
suddenly it came to me to thrust the candle about. I thought I would
run out and if I met any one I would call, 'Fire', and say the
general was burning and perhaps in the confusion--"

The terrible desperation of her both stirred and wrung him. She was
so little, so helpless, so trembling in his clasp ... so made for
love and tenderness.... And to think of her in such fear and horror
that she went thrusting reckless candles into her hangings, setting
a palace on fire in the blind fury for escape....

To such work had this night brought her.... This night, and three
men--for he and the craven Tewfick and the fanatic bey were all
linked in this night's work. Yes, and another man--and he thought
swiftly, in a lightning flash of wonder, how little that Paul
Delcasse had known when he set his eager face toward the Old World,
with his wife and baby with him, that he was setting his feet into
such a web ... that his wife would die, languishing in a pasha's
harem, and his little daughter would one night be flying in mad
terror from the cruel beast the weak pasha had sold her to!

And how little, for that matter, he had known when he had set his
own face toward those same sands what secrets he would discover
there and what forbidden ways his heart would know.

These thoughts all went through him like one thought, in some clear,
remote background of his mind, while he was swiftly drawing on the
military cloak she gave him and wrapping her in the black mantle.
There was a veil on the mantle's hood that she could fling across
her face when she wished, but Ryder had no fez to complete the
deceptive outline of his masquerade. He must trust to the dark and
to the concealment of the high, military collar of the cloak.

"Do you know a way?" he whispered and at her shaken head, "The water
gate," he said, thinking swiftly.

There would be a crowd now about the gate, but if they could only
manage to gain those cellars and hide somewhere they could steal out
later upon that waterman.

It seemed the most feasible of all the desperate plans. The roofs
might be a trap. The harem entrance led into a garden and the garden
was guarded by an impassable wall. But if he could only get to the
river he