ng she fell to weeping. "O source of my life!" she cried to him,
"how cruelly unjust to me thou art!" She was grovelling now, a thing of
supplest grace, her lovely arms entwining his knees. "When my love for
thee drives me to utter what I see, I earn but thy anger, which is more
than I can endure. I swoon beneath the weight of it."

He flung her off impatiently. "What a weariness is a woman's tongue!" he
cried, and stalked out again, convinced from past experiences that did
he linger he would be whelmed in a torrent of words.

But her poison was shrewdly administered, and slowly did its work. It
abode in his mind to torture him with the doubts that were its very
essence. No reason, however well founded, that she might have urged for
Sakr-el-Bahr's strange conduct could have been half so insidious as
her suggestion that there was a reason. It gave him something vague and
intangible to consider. Something that he could not repel since it had
no substance he could grapple with. Impatiently he awaited the morning
and the coming of Sakr-el-Bahr himself, but he no longer awaited it with
the ardent whole-hearted eagerness as of a father awaiting the coming of
a beloved son.

Sakr-el-Bahr himself paced the poop deck of the carack and watched
the lights perish one by one in the little town that straggled up the
hillside before him. The moon came up and bathed it in a white hard
light, throwing sharp inky shadows of rustling date palm and spearlike
minaret, and flinging shafts of silver athwart the peaceful bay.

His wound was healed and he was fully himself once more. Two days ago he
had come on deck for the first time since the fight with the Dutchman,
and he had spent there the greater portion of the time since then. Once
only had he visited his captives. He had risen from his couch to repair
straight to the cabin in the poop where Rosamund was confined. He had
found her pale and very wistful, but with her courage entirely unbroken.
The Godolphins were a stiff-necked race, and Rosamund bore in her frail
body the spirit of a man. She looked up when he entered, started a
little in surprise to see him at last, for it was the first time he
stood before her since he had carried her off from Arwenack some four
weeks ago. Then she had averted her eyes, and sat there, elbows on the
table, as if carved of wood, as if blind to his presence and deaf to his
words.

To the expressions of regret--and they were sincere, for already he
r