known throughout the length and the breadth of the land to the
Arabs: she was neither child nor woman to them; she was but the soldier
who had brought up the French reserve at Zaraila; she was but the foe
who had seen them defeated, and ridden down with her comrades in their
pursuit in twice a score of vanquished, bitter, intolerably shameful
days. Some among them had sworn by their God to put her to a fearful
death if ever they made her captive, for they held her in superstitious
awe, and thought the spell of the Frankish successes would be broken if
she were slain. She knew that; yet, knowing it, she looked at their
advancing band one moment, then turned her horse's head and rode
straight toward them.

"They will kill me, but that may save him," she thought. "Any other way
he is lost."

So she rode directly toward them; rode so that she crossed their front,
and placed herself in their path, standing quite still, with the cloth
torn from the lantern, so that its light fell full about her, as she
held it above her head. In an instant they knew her. They were the
remnant who had escaped from the carnage of Zaraila; they knew her with
all the rapid unerring surety of hate. They gave the shrill wild
war-shout of their tribe, and the whole mass of gaunt, dark, mounted
figures with their weapons whirling round their heads enclosed her: a
cloud of kites settled down with their black wings and cruel beaks upon
one young silvery-plumed gerfalcon.

She sat unmoved, and looked up at the naked blades that flashed above
her: there was no fear upon her face, only a calm resolute proud beauty,
very pale, very still in the light that gleamed on it from the lantern
rays.

"I surrender," she said briefly. She had never thought to say these
words of submission to her scorned foes; she would not have been brought
to utter them to spare her own existence. Their answer was a yell of
furious delight, and their bare blades smote each other with a clash of
brutal joy: they had her, the Frankish child who had brought shame and
destruction on them at Zaraila, and they longed to draw their steel
across the fair young throat, to plunge their lances into the bright
bare bosom, to twine her hair round their spear handles, to rend her
delicate limbs apart, as a tiger rends the antelope, to torture, to
outrage, to wreak their vengeance on her. Their chief, only, motioned
their violence back from her, and bade them leave her untouched. At him
she