up in sheer surprise.  Then her heart seemed to stop suddenly, and then leap with excessive thuds of horror against her breast.  The face above her seemed carved in stone, pale, bloodless, calm; it was set, as the girl realised in a moment of terror and agony, in a repose that would never be broken.  The large, dark eyes, still open, gazed past her, sightless, changeless.  Fear, her fear of him, her awe, her oppressed terror fell from her, giving way to an infinite regret, a sorrow, a sense of loss that rushed over her, filling every cell, every atom of her being.  She, the unwilling, the reluctant, the slow-coming, the grudging bride, now stood free.  The bridegroom asked of her nothing, demanded nothing, needed nothing, desired nothing.

The slave-girl neither shrieked nor fainted.  A great, convulsive sob tore itself from her trembling body as she rose from her knees and bent over the sitting figure.  Wildly she passed her soft, shaking fingers across his brow, still warm, and round his throat, seeking mechanically the wound; then her eyes fell on the gold silk of his tunic, and just over the left breast she saw a little brown patch, and on the left side of the chair the silver light gleamed on a small, dark-red pool.  He had been stabbed as he sat there, waiting for her—­stabbed from the back, and the dagger thrust through to the little brown spot in the front of the tunic.  And through that tiny door his life had gone.

Lying at his feet, Dilama sobbed uncontrollably, rolling her head, with its wonderful crown of flower-decked hair, and her pink-silk clad body amongst the rugs on the floor.  What was the worth or use of anything now, silk or bridal attire, or beauty, or flower-decked hair?  Never would any of them now be mirrored in his eyes again.  Never could anything change that awful serenity, that implacable silence, out of which she felt her own love, her own desire rush upon her and devour her.  Ahmed had been hers and she had shrunk from him, and now all the blood in her body she would have given willingly to replace that little scarlet stream that had borne away his life.

As she lay there, weeping in an agony of despair, a dark shadow suddenly grew in the window, and fell a black patch in the panel of white light upon the floor.  A lithe figure balanced a moment on the ledge of the open window, then leapt with the silent elastic bound of a cat into the room.  Dilama sprang from the floor to her knees with a smothered cry of terror.

“Murad! why have you come here?”

The Druze leant over her and caught her arm fiercely.

“To claim my own.  It is not the first visit I have made to-night, as you see,” and as he dragged her up from her knees he indicated the motionless figure beside them.

“You killed him!” she whispered, gazing up with dilated, terrified eyes.

“Who should, if not I?  Had he not taken my wife?  Come, we must be going.”

With the nail-like grip on her arm, and the low, savage tones in her ears, and the blazing eyes like a tiger’s, inflamed with the lust of murder above her, the girl felt sick and half-fainting with fear and misery.