icious as they must be of our
presence."

Sakr-el-Bahr came out of his musings. "Othmani," said he, "art a fool,
the very father of fools, else wouldst thou have come to know by now
that those who once were of my own race, those of the land from which
I am sprung, are sacred to me. Here we take no slave but these we have.
On, then, in the name of Allah!"

But Othmani was not yet silenced. "And is our perilous voyage across
these unknown seas into this far heathen land to be rewarded by no more
than just these two captives? Is that a raid worthy of Sakr-el-Bahr?"

"Leave Sakr-el-Bahr to judge," was the curt answer.

"But reflect, my lord: there is another who will judge. How shall our
Basha, the glorious Asad-ed-Din, welcome thy return with such poor
spoils as these? What questions will he set thee, and what account
shalt thou render him for having imperilled the lives of all these
True-Believers upon the seas for so little profit?"

"He shall ask me what he pleases, and I shall answer what I please and
as Allah prompts me. On, I say!"

And on they went, Sakr-el-Bahr conscious now of little but the warmth
of that body upon his shoulder, and knowing not, so tumultuous were his
emotions, whether it fired him to love or hate.

They gained the beach; they reached the ship whose very presence had
continued unsuspected. The breeze was fresh and they stood away at once.
By sunrise there was no more sign of them than there had been at sunset,
there was no more clue to the way they had taken than to the way they
had come. It was as if they had dropped from the skies in the night upon
that Cornish coast, and but for the mark of their swift, silent passage,
but for the absence of Rosamund and Lionel Tressilian, the thing must
have been accounted no more than a dream of those few who had witnessed
it.

Aboard the carack, Sakr-el-Bahr bestowed Rosamund in the cabin over
the quarter, taking the precaution to lock the door that led to the
stern-gallery. Lionel he ordered to be dropped into a dark hole under
the hatchway, there to lie and meditate upon the retribution that had
overtaken him until such time as his brother should have determined
upon his fate--for this was a matter upon which the renegade was still
undecided.

Himself he lay under the stars that night and thought of many things.
One of these things, which plays some part in the story, though it is
probable that it played but a slight one in his thoughts, was be