“He left me, to go to those screams,” she was saying rapidly.  “I tried to run that way—­and found that woman coming back.  And I told her to wait—­in her own room—­and I slipped back in there—­and suddenly it came to me to thrust the candle about.  I thought I would run out and if I met any one I would call, ‘Fire’, and say the general was burning and perhaps in the confusion—­”

The terrible desperation of her both stirred and wrung him.  She was so little, so helpless, so trembling in his clasp ... so made for love and tenderness....  And to think of her in such fear and horror that she went thrusting reckless candles into her hangings, setting a palace on fire in the blind fury for escape....

To such work had this night brought her....  This night, and three men—­for he and the craven Tewfick and the fanatic bey were all linked in this night’s work.  Yes, and another man—­and he thought swiftly, in a lightning flash of wonder, how little that Paul Delcasse had known when he set his eager face toward the Old World, with his wife and baby with him, that he was setting his feet into such a web ... that his wife would die, languishing in a pasha’s harem, and his little daughter would one night be flying in mad terror from the cruel beast the weak pasha had sold her to!

And how little, for that matter, he had known when he had set his own face toward those same sands what secrets he would discover there and what forbidden ways his heart would know.

These thoughts all went through him like one thought, in some clear, remote background of his mind, while he was swiftly drawing on the military cloak she gave him and wrapping her in the black mantle.  There was a veil on the mantle’s hood that she could fling across her face when she wished, but Ryder had no fez to complete the deceptive outline of his masquerade.  He must trust to the dark and to the concealment of the high, military collar of the cloak.

“Do you know a way?” he whispered and at her shaken head, “The water gate,” he said, thinking swiftly.

There would be a crowd now about the gate, but if they could only manage to gain those cellars and hide somewhere they could steal out later upon that waterman.

It seemed the most feasible of all the desperate plans.  The roofs might be a trap.  The harem entrance led into a garden and the garden was guarded by an impassable wall.  But if he could only get to the river he knew that he was a strong enough swimmer to save Aimee, or he might even terrorize the watchman into furnishing a boat.

She did not question but guided him swiftly through the arch that led down into the banqueting hall.  Twice that day she had gone down those stairs.  Once in her bridal state, her eyes shining, her cheeks glowing with the wild joy of Ryder’s arrival and dreams of escape, and again, scarcely an hour gone by, she had descended them, tense and desperate, her revolver at the general’s head, seeking vainly Ryder’s rescue.