attempt to hide her tears. Iskender sprang to her.

"He is dead?" he moaned in Arabic. "May Allah have mercy on him!"

"He lives, the praise to Allah!" she replied, and with the words she
wept more copiously, and turned from him to smell the clustered flowers
of a certain creeping plant against the wall.

Echoing "Praise to Allah!" he withdrew.

She had not recognised him, had heard his question as the voice of
Nature. It seemed to him that she had not answered it, but merely
sighed aloud her own thanksgiving.

"She loves him!" thought Iskender, with a flush of sympathy.

He found strange rapture in the knowledge of her passion for the fair
Emir, in the prospect of a union of those two whom he had loved most of
all people in his former life. They seemed in a sense his creatures,
and their love his handiwork. If only he could help them to obtain
their heart's desire, could serve their happiness by any means, and get
forgiveness, he felt that he could enter on his new life without one
regret.

CHAPTER XXVI

Each morning and evening Iskender walked upon the sandhills until he
met with some one coming from the Mission who could give him the latest
tidings of the Emir. His mother spied him once from her house-door,
and indulged in furious gesticulations to the effect that he must fly
for his life. When he gave no heed she shook her fist at him, and
opened her mouth wide to utter something, the sense of which was lost
in the distance. She even came to his lodging, stealthily as of wont,
and implored him never to walk again so near the Mission. It stopped
her breath, and caused her deathlike palpitations to behold him there.
The hatred of those children of abomination was so rank against him,
that they might hurt his body. At the least they would wound his soul
with indignities which she could not bear to think of for her boy.

"Hilda is the only one of them with any kindness; and she, I know, is
always in the sickroom; she never now goes out beyond the garden. The
mother of George is absent; the preacher Ward has gone again. The
others! They are known for devils, and they hate thee! What madness
in thee to approach their house!"

When Iskender only laughed, she wrung her hands despairingly, and asked
her Maker for deliverance from such a madman. Her apprehensions
proved, however, quite unfounded.

The ladies Carulin and Jane were touched by Iskender's solicitude, and
noticed him when passing