“I bring you,” he said; “a message that will not, I am afraid, be welcome.  He whose guest you were at Serocasfe invites you to pay him an immediate visit; and the invitation must be accepted at once.”

I drew myself up with no little indignation at the imperative tone, but feeling at least equal awe at the stern calmness with which the mandate was spoken.

“And what compels me to such haste, or to compliance without consideration?”

“That power,” he returned, “which none can resist, and to which you may not demur.”

Seeing that I still hesitated—­in truth, the summons had turned my vague misgiving into intense though equally vague alarm and even terror, which as unmanly and unworthy I strove to repress, but which asserted its domination in a manner as unwonted as unwelcome—­he drew aside a fold of his robe, and showed within the silver Star of the Order, supported by the golden sash, that marked a rank second only to that of the wearer of the Signet itself.  I understood too well by this time, through conversations with him and other communications of which it has been needless to speak, the significance of this revelation.  I knew the impossibility of questioning the authority to which I had pledged obedience.  I realised with great amazement the fact that a secondary position on my own estate, and a personal charge of my own safety, had been accepted by a Chief of the Zinta.

“There is, of course,” I replied at last, “no answer to a mandate so enforced.  But, Chief, reluctant as I am to say it, I fear—­fear as I have never done before; and yet fear I cannot say, I cannot guess what.”

“There is no cause for alarm,” he said somewhat contemptuously.  “In this journey, sudden, speedy, and made under our guard as on our summons, there is little or none of that peril which has beset you so long.”

“You forget, Chief,” I rejoined, “that you speak to a soldier, whose chosen trade was to risk life at the word of a superior; to one whose youth thought no smile so bright as that of naked steel, and had often ‘kissed the lips of the lightning’ ere the down darkened his own.  At any rate, you have told me daily for more than a year that I am living under constant peril of assassination; have I seemed to quail thereat?  If, then, I am now terrified for the first time, that which I dread, without knowing or dreaming what it is, is assuredly a peril worse than any I have known, the shadow of a calamity against which I have neither weapon nor courage.  It cannot be for myself that I am thus appalled,” I continued, the thought flashing into my mind as I spoke it, “and there is but one whose life is so closely bound with mine that danger to her should bring such terror as this.  I go at your bidding, but I will not go alone.”

He paused for some time, apparently in perplexity, certainly in deep thought, before he replied.

“As you will.  One thing more.  The slips of tafroo with which you furnished me have been under the eyes of which you have heard.  This” (handing me the one that bore no mark) “has passed, so far as the highest powers of the sense that is not of the body can perceive, through none but innocent hands.  The hand from which you received this” (the marked slip) “is spotted with treason, and may to-morrow be red.”