e
had set for her and he had recognized her as the same little girl he
had brutalized and mal-treated years before his gratification had been
huge. Now he lost no time in establishing the old relations of father
and daughter that had existed between them in the past. At the first
opportunity he struck her a heavy blow across the face. He forced her
to walk when he might have dismounted one of his men instead, or had
her carried on a horse's rump. He seemed to revel in the discovery of
new methods for torturing or humiliating her, and among all his
followers she found no single one to offer her sympathy, or who dared
defend her, even had they had the desire to do so.

A two days' march brought them at last to the familiar scenes of her
childhood, and the first face upon which she set her eyes as she was
driven through the gates into the strong stockade was that of the
toothless, hideous Mabunu, her one time nurse. It was as though all
the years that had intervened were but a dream. Had it not been for
her clothing and the fact that she had grown in stature she might well
have believed it so. All was there as she had left it--the new faces
which supplanted some of the old were of the same bestial, degraded
type. There were a few young Arabs who had joined The Sheik since she
had been away. Otherwise all was the same--all but one. Geeka was not
there, and she found herself missing Geeka as though the ivory-headed
one had been a flesh and blood intimate and friend. She missed her
ragged little confidante, into whose deaf ears she had been wont to
pour her many miseries and her occasional joys--Geeka, of the splinter
limbs and the ratskin torso--Geeka the disreputable--Geeka the beloved.

For a time the inhabitants of The Sheik's village who had not been upon
the march with him amused themselves by inspecting the strangely clad
white girl, whom some of them had known as a little child. Mabunu
pretended great joy at her return, baring her toothless gums in a
hideous grimace that was intended to be indicative of rejoicing. But
Meriem could but shudder as she recalled the cruelties of this terrible
old hag in the years gone by.

Among the Arabs who had come in her absence was a tall young fellow of
twenty--a handsome, sinister looking youth--who stared at her in open
admiration until The Sheik came and ordered him away, and Abdul Kamak
went, scowling.

At last, their curiosity satisfied, Meriem was alone. As o