who must be hardened and nourished into strength, and who might
very well die in the process? Even at five philips he would be dear. So
the disgusted dalal came back to Ali.

"He is thine, then, for five philips--Allah pardon thy avarice."

Ali grinned, and his men seized upon Lionel and bore him off into the
background to join the two negroes previously purchased.

And then, before Ali could bid for another of the slaves he desired to
acquire, a tall, elderly Jew, dressed in black doublet and hose like a
Castilian gentleman, with a ruffle at his neck, a plumed bonnet on his
grey locks, and a serviceable dagger hanging from his girdle of hammered
gold, had claimed the attention of the dalal.

In the pen that held the captives of the lesser raids conducted by
Biskaine sat an Andalusian girl of perhaps some twenty years, of a
beauty entirely Spanish.

Her face was of the warm pallor of ivory, her massed hair of an ebony
black, her eyebrows were finely pencilled, and her eyes of deepest and
softest brown. She was dressed in the becoming garb of the Castilian
peasant, the folded kerchief of red and yellow above her bodice leaving
bare the glories of her neck. She was very pale, and her eyes were wild
in their look, but this detracted nothing from her beauty.

She had attracted the jew's notice, and it is not impossible that there
may have stirred in him a desire to avenge upon her some of the cruel
wrongs, some of the rackings, burning, confiscations, and banishment
suffered by the men of his race at the hands of the men of hers. He may
have bethought him of invaded ghettos, of Jewish maidens ravished,
and Jewish children butchered in the name of the God those Spanish
Christians worshipped, for there was something almost of contemptuous
fierceness in his dark eyes and in the hand he flung out to indicate
her.

"Yonder is a Castilian wench for whom I will give fifty Philips, O
dalal," he announced. The datal made a sign, whereupon the corsairs
dragged her struggling forth.

"So much loveliness may not be bought for fifty Philips, O Ibrahim,"
said he. "Yusuf here will pay sixty at least." And he stood expectantly
before a resplendent Moor.

The Moor, however, shook his head.

"Allah knows I have three wives who would destroy her loveliness within
the hour and so leave me the loser."

The dalal moved on, the girl following him but contesting every step of
the way with those who impelled her forward, and reviling t