such motives as had I. I wanted you that
I might punish you. But he...O God!" he groaned, and for a moment put
his face to his hands.

She rose slowly, a strange agitation stirring in her, her bosom
galloping. But in his overwrought condition he failed to observe it. And
then like a ray of hope to illumine his despair came the counsel that
Fenzileh had given him, the barrier which she had said that Asad, being
a devout Muslim, would never dare to violate.

"There is a way," he cried. "There is the way suggested by Fenzileh
at the promptings of her malice." An instant he hesitated, his eyes
averted. Then he made his plunge. "You must marry me."

It was almost as if he had struck her. She recoiled. Instantly suspicion
awoke in her; swiftly it drew to a conviction that he had but sought to
trick her by a pretended penitence.

"Marry you!" she echoed.

"Ay," he insisted. And he set himself to explain to her how if she were
his wife she must be sacred and inviolable to all good Muslimeen, that
none could set a finger upon her without doing outrage to the Prophet's
holy law, and that, whoever might be so disposed, Asad was not of those,
since Asad was perfervidly devout. "Thus only," he ended, "can I place
you beyond his reach."

But she was still scornfully reluctant.

"It is too desperate a remedy even for so desperate an ill," said she,
and thus drove him into a frenzy of impatience with her.

"You must, I say," he insisted, almost angrily. "You must--or else
consent to be borne this very night to Asad's hareem--and not even as
his wife, but as his slave. Oh, you must trust me for your own sake! You
must!"

"Trust you!" she cried, and almost laughed in the intensity of her
scorn. "Trust you! How can I trust one who is a renegade and worse?"

He controlled himself that he might reason with her, that by cold logic
he might conquer her consent.

"You are very unmerciful," he said. "In judging me you leave out of
all account the suffering through which I have gone and what yourself
contributed to it. Knowing now how falsely I was accused and what other
bitter wrongs I suffered, consider that I was one to whom the man and
the woman I most loved in all this world had proven false. I had lost
faith in man and in God, and if I became a Muslim, a renegade, and a
corsair, it was because there was no other gate by which I could escape
the unutterable toil of the oar to which I had been chained." He looked
at her sadly.