On some dark night like this, with the gatekeeper drowsy with old wine, some other stripling had climbed that worn facade before him and slipped through the secret space and stood triumphantly before some daring, laughing girl who had cast aside for him her veil and her fear of death.

What ingenuity, Ryder wondered fleetly, had smuggled in the carpenter for the contrivance, what jewels had gone to the bribing, what lies had been told!...  And what had been the end of it all?

Evidently not the discovery of the opening....

He hoped, with singular intensity, for the safety of the daring young lovers, that unknown youth whose feet had foreworn the path for his feet and that dead and gone young girl, who had dared anything rather than endure the mortal ennui of those hours behind the veil....

These thoughts all went through him like one thought as he stood there, his eyes roving about the dim, shadowy room of old divans and Eastern hangings, and then turning back to the glimmering figure of its mistress.

She was staring frankly at him, her eyes boldly curious and examining.  They were not dark eyes, he saw now; that had been the impression given by the kohl about them and the black line of the brows penciled into one line; they were yellow eyes, golden and glowing, scornful and lazy-lidded.

As she looked at him, these eyes smiled slowly.  She was seeing in this lover of her rival a singularly delightful looking young man, for all his dust and disarray, a slender, bronzed, hardy-looking young man, with dark, disordered hair straying across a white brow, and audacious, eager eyes in which the fear of death, so lately glimpsed, had left no daunting reflection.

Slowly she lifted her hand and with deliberate softness put back that straying hair of his.

“Poor boy,” she said slowly in English, and then, smiling ruefully, she held out her hands for his inspection.  The grime of the bricks had discolored their scented delicacy and he saw bruised finger tips and a torn nail.

“I’m infernally sorry,” he said quickly.

Her smile deepened at his look of concern, as he held, a little helplessly, the witnesses of her work of rescue which seemed somehow to stray into his keeping.

“It is nothing—­but you—­poor boy,” she said again, in that English of which she seemed naively proud.

“If you could give me some water,” he suggested, and drank deep with delight the last drop she brought him from an earthen jar.  It seemed to wash from his throat the taste of that dust and fear.

“I can’t begin to thank you,” he murmured.  “I only wish that I could do something for you—­”

She looked up at him.  They were standing close together, their voices cautiously low.

“Perhaps, yes, you can—­”

“It’s not doing anything for you to save Aimee,” he told her.  “That’s what you are doing for her and for me....  But if ever you want me for anything after this—­my name is Ryder, Jack Ryder, and you can reach me at the Agricultural Bank.”