when at last I
learnt that he had failed to purchase her as I commanded, I could have
wept for very grief. I feared at first that some merchant from the
Sus might have bought her and departed; but when I heard--blessed be
Allah!--that thou wert the buyer, I was comforted again. For thou'lt
yield her up to me, my son."

He spoke with such confidence that Oliver had a difficulty in choosing
the words that were to disillusion him. Therefore he stood in hesitancy
a moment.

"I will make good thy, loss," Asad ran on. "Thou shalt have the sixteen
hundred philips paid and another five hundred to console thee. Say that
will content thee; for I boil with impatience."

Sakr-el-Bahr smiled grimly. "It is an impatience well known to me, my
lord, where she is concerned," he answered slowly. "I boiled with
it myself for five interminable years. To make an end of it I went a
distant perilous voyage to England in a captured Frankish vessel. Thou
didst not know, O Asad, else thou wouldst...."

"Bah!" broke in the Basha. "Thou'rt a huckster born. There is none like
thee, Sakr-el-Bahr, in any game of wits. Well, well, name thine own
price, strike thine own profit out of my impatience and let us have
done."

"My lord," he said quietly, "it is not the profit that is in question.
She is not for sale."

Asad blinked at him, speechless, and slowly a faint colour crept into
his sallow cheeks.

"Not... not for sale?" he echoed, faltering in his amazement.

"Not if thou offered me thy Bashalik as the price of her," was the
solemn answer. Then more warmly, in a voice that held a note of
intercession--"Ask anything else that is mine," he continued, "and
gladly will I lay it at thy feet in earnest of my loyalty and love for
thee."

"But I want nothing else." Asad's tone was impatient, petulant almost.
"I want this slave."

"Then," replied Oliver, "I cast myself upon thy mercy and beseech thee
to turn thine eyes elsewhere."

Asad scowled upon him. "Dost thou deny me?" he demanded, throwing back
his head.

"Alas!" said Sakr-el-Bahr.

There fell a pause. Darker and darker grew the countenance of Asad,
fiercer glowed the eyes he bent upon his lieutenant. "I see," he said at
last, with a calm so oddly at variance with his looks as to be sinister.
"I see. It seems that there is more truth in Fenzileh than I suspected.
So!" He considered the corsair a moment with his sunken smouldering
eyes.

Then he addressed him in a tone that vibra