ould speak out, advance my proofs,
and so destroy him. There was the matter of that wound, and there was
something still more unanswerable he feared I might have urged. There
was a certain woman--a wanton up at Malpas--who could have been made
to speak, who could have revealed a rivalry concerning her betwixt the
slayer and your brother. For the affair in which Peter Godolphin met his
death was a pitifully, shamefully sordid one at bottom."

For the first time she interrupted him, fiercely. "Do you malign the
dead?"

"Patience, mistress," he commanded. "I malign none. I speak the truth of
a dead man that the truth may be known of two living ones. Hear me out,
then! I have waited long and survived a deal that I might tell you this

"That craven, then, conceived that I might become a danger to him; so
he decided to remove me. He contrived to have me kidnapped one night and
put aboard a vessel to be carried to Barbary and sold there as a slave.
That is the truth of my disappearance. And the slayer, whom I had
befriended and sheltered at my own bitter cost, profited yet further by
my removal. God knows whether the prospect of such profit was a further
temptation to him. In time he came to succeed me in my possessions, and
at last to succeed me even in the affections of the faithless woman who
once had been my affianced wife."

At last she started from the frozen patience in which she had listened
hitherto. "Do you say that... that Lionel...?" she was beginning in a
voice choked by indignation.

And then Lionel spoke at last, straightening himself into a stiffly
upright attitude.

"He lies!" he cried. "He lies, Rosamund! Do not heed him."

"I do not," she answered, turning away.

A wave of colour suffused the swarthy face of Sakr-el-Bahr. A moment
his eyes followed her as she moved away a step or two, then they turned
their blazing light of anger upon Lionel. He strode silently across to
him, his mien so menacing that Lionel shrank back in fresh terror.

Sakr-el-Bahr caught his brother's wrist in a grip that was as that of
a steel manacle. "We'll have the truth this night if we have to tear it
from you with red-hot pincers," he said between his teeth.

He dragged him forward to the middle of the terrace and held him
there before Rosamund, forcing him down upon his knees into a cowering
attitude by the violence of that grip upon his wrist.

"Do you know aught of the ingenuity of Moorish torture?" he asked him.
"Y