w we do, even when youth and
beauty and health have passed from us. How, crippled and unlovely,
twisted of temper or limb, with failing senses, in bath-chair, or
propped on sticks, we hang on to the last thread, when surely we ought
to be so thankful to snap it and be away to whatever our lives here
have prepared for us over the border.

"Were't not a shame, were't not a loss for him
In this clay carcase, crippled, to abide?"

Well might old Omar ponder upon this.

But Zulannah had a good reason for clinging to life, in spite of the
greatness of her debacle.

The metal of which had been wrought the one love that had come to her
in her short life had not been able to withstand the crucible of
physical pain. For hours and days she had writhed in the agony of her
physical injury, with no one to care if she suffered or starved, except
the Ethiopian, who, when her senses had come back to her, had twitted
her upon her failure in her love-affairs; had tormented and mocked and
laughed, until a great wish for revenge had taken the place of her
former love for the Englishman. Revenge, above all things, on the girl
who had been capable of inspiring love in two such men; revenge on the
white man who had really been the primary cause of her downfall, but a
lingering, hellish revenge, if she could only think of one, for the man
who had given the order to the dogs just because she had reviled the
white girl, Damaris.

So she sat on the pile of cushions, smoking the cheapest cigarette of
the bazaar, whilst her cunning brain wove plots around the astounding
news Qatim had just imparted.

They were perfectly free from interruption. The door was barred and
the small aperture which served as window was too highly placed in the
wall to allow of eyes to peep; but it was superstition that really kept
them safe and proved far more potent as a barrier against their
neighbours' curiosity than any spike-crowned wall.

Qatim had given out that the woman was bewitched, and that death,
instantaneous and horrible, would be the fate awaiting anyone but
himself who should speak to her or look upon her unveiled face before
the setting of the sun--some of us Christians refuse to walk under
ladders--and, although it entailed much fetching and carrying and
marketing on his part, still, it ensured them solitude.

"And you saw him?"

She spoke with a sibilant intaking of breath, caused by the twist to
her mouth.

"Yes; with a beautiful