ted up. She was on a couch of
silk and leopard-skins; at her feet a fair young girl with a fan of
pheasant feathers. She stared at the hangings of the tent, which were
richer than those of her own tribe; the cloths, and the cushions, and the
embroideries; and the strangeness of all was pain to her, she knew not
why. Then wept she bitterly, and with her tears the memory of what had
been came back to her, and she opened her arms to take into them the
little girl that fanned her, that she might love something and be beloved
awhile; and the child sobbed with her. After a time Bhanavar said, 'Where
am I, and amongst whom, my child, my sister?'

And the child answered her, 'Surely in the tent of the mother of Ruark,
the chief, even chief of the Beni-Asser, and he found thee in the desert,
nigh dead. 'Tis so; and this morning will Ruark be gone to meet the
challenge of Ebn Asrac, and they will fight at the foot of the Snow
Mountains, and the shadow of yonder date-palm will be over our tent here
at the hour they fight, and I shall sing for Ruark, and kneel here in the
darkness of the shadow.'

While the child was speaking there entered to them a tall aged woman,
with one swathe of a turban across her long level brows; and she had hard
black eyes, and close lips and a square chin; and it was the mother of
Ruark. She strode forward toward Bhanavar to greet her, and folded her
legs before the damsel. Presently she said, 'Tell me thy story, and of
thy coming into the hands of Ruark my son.'

Bhanavar shuddered. So Rukrooth dismissed the little maiden from the
chamber of the tent, and laid her left hand on one arm of Bhanavar, and
said, 'I would know whence comest thou, that we may deal well by thee and
thy people that have lost thee.'

The touch of a hand was as the touch of a corpse to Bhanavar, and the
damsel was constrained to speak by a power she knew not of, and she told
all to Rukrooth of what had been, the great misery, and the wickedness
that was hers. Then Ruark's mother took hold of Bhanavar a strong grasp,
and eyed her long, piteously, and with reproach, and rocked forward and
back, and kept rocking to and fro, crying at intervals, 'O Ruark! my son!
my son! this feared I, and thou art not the first! and I saw it, I saw
it! Well-away! why came she in thy way, why, Ruark, my son, my fire-eye?
Canst thou be saved by me, fated that thou art, thou fair-face? And wilt
thou be saved by me, my son, ere thy story be told in te