Upon Ryder’s helpless body a cold sweat of incredulous horror broke softly out.

At his feet he heard the black beginning to fit his bricks and smooth his mortar.

“You do well to save your breath,” said Hamdi Bey at last, as Ryder still stood silent.  “You will need it in this chamber I am providing....  But it may be,” he said thoughtfully, “that your breath will last your need.  Thirst may be the more impatient for her victim; they tell me thirst is an obtrusive visitor.  As you were, this evening....  Still, why do you not cry out a little?  It will amuse my black.”

Yes, this was real, Ryder reminded himself.  And these things could happen—­had happened.  He remembered suddenly the hideous scene, outside the dungeons, in “Francesca da Rimini,” when that bestial brother goes in to the helpless prisoners.  He remembered the sick horror of those groans....

He remembered also various excursions of his in the Tower of London and the Seigniory of Florence, and the sight of old rings and stakes and racks and the feeling of their total unrelatedness to every actuality.

And yet they had happened.  And this thing, for all its fantastic medieval horror, was happening.  Brick by brick the imprisoning wall was rising.  Brick by brick it intervened between him and sane, sensible, happy, normal life.

Eye for eye he gave the general back his look.  He had always wondered about the poor devils in underground torture chambers.  Had wondered how they had the stuff to hold out, against such odds, for some belief, some information....  Now he knew the stiffening stuff of a personal hate, upholding to the very grave....

That sardonic, devil’s face....  That face which was going back upstairs to Aimee....  But he must not think of that or he should give way and begin to babble, to plead....  He must simply stand and meet that glance....

And there came the incredible, insane moment when Ryder looked out on that face through one last breathing space, and then saw the fitted brick, settled into place, blot the world to darkness before his eyes.

CHAPTER XV

UNDERGROUND

Alone in the gloom of that strange room, Aimee sat rigid.  Listening.  Not a sound, beyond the closed door, from the long drawing room.  Not a sound, beyond the other door, from the room where the slave, Fatima, waited to assist in her disrobing.

Silence everywhere—­save for a low lapping of water against the masonry beneath her windows.

The palace was on the river, then, or on some old backwater.  She remembered glimpses of dark canals on her drive that morning—­had it only been that morning?  The sound of that soft, hidden water added to her feeling of isolation and remoteness from everything that had been her life before—­she thought fleetingly, almost indifferently of her friends, Azima, who to-day had crowned her for happiness, and fond, foolish old Miriam and Madame de Coulevain and Tewfick Pasha, weakly cruel, but amiable; she thought of them all, as unreal figures from whom she had long taken leave.