ve
her, too, Lionel. Thus to the torment that awaits your body shall be
added torment for your treacherous soul--such torture of mind as only
the damned may know. To that end have I brought you hither. That you may
realize something of what is in store for this woman at my hands; that
you may take the thought of it with you to be to your mind worse than
the boatswain's lash to your pampered body."

"You devil!" snarled Lionel. "Oh, you fiend out of hell!"

"If you will manufacture devils, little toad of a brother, do not
upbraid them for being devils when next you meet them."

"Give him no heed, Lionel!" said Rosamund. "I shall prove him as much a
boaster as he has proved himself a villain. Never think that he will be
able to work his evil will."

"'Tis you are the boaster there," said Sakr-el-Bahr. "And for the rest,
I am what you and he, between you, have made me."

"Did we make you liar and coward?--for that is what you are indeed," she
answered.

"Coward?" he echoed, in genuine surprise. "'Twill be some lie that he
has told you with the others. In what, pray, was I ever a coward?"

"In what? In this that you do now; in this taunting and torturing of two
helpless beings in our power."

"I speak not of what I am," he replied, "for I have told you that I am
what you have made me. I speak of what I was. I speak of the past."

She looked at him and she seemed to measure him with her unwavering
glance.

"You speak of the past?" she echoed, her voice low. "You speak of the
past and to me? You dare?"

"It is that we might speak of it together that I have fetched you all
the way from England; that at last I may tell you things I was a fool
to have kept from you five years ago; that we may resume a conversation
which you interrupted when you dismissed me."

"I did you a monstrous injury, no doubt," she answered him, with bitter
irony. "I was surely wanting in consideration. It would have become me
better to have smiled and fawned upon my brother's murderer."

"I swore to you, then, that I was not his murderer," he reminded her in
a voice that shook.

"And I answered you that you lied."

"Ay, and on that you dismissed me--the word of the man whom you
professed to love, the word of the man to whom you had given your trust
weighing for naught with you."

"When I gave you my trust," she retorted, "I did so in ignorance of your
true self, in a headstrong wilful ignorance that would not be guided
by what all th