“I haven’t an hour,” said Ryder very desperately and unhappily.  “Not when Aimee is with that devil—­”

It took every thought of Aimee to get the words out.

He felt a brute about it, a low, ungrateful dog.  She had given him life and every fiber in him clamored to save her pride and champion her caprice.

It seemed so dastardly to wrench away from her now, like some self-centered Joseph, leaving that beastly stab in her vanity....  And she was a stunning creature, lawless, elemental, hot and cold like the seventh wind of the inferno....

But it was Aimee who was in his blood like a fever....  Aimee, that frail white rose of a girl, in her bonds of terror....

He saw the flame in Aziza’s eyes.  He saw the stiffening of her defiance, of half-incredulous affront.  Then, her form drawn up, her bared arms outflung, her vivid, painted, furious face challenging him.  “I am not beautiful—­like Aimee?” she said in a voice of venom, and in the English, for double measure, “You not like me—­no?”

“You are beautiful and I do like you,” Ryder combated, feeling a bungling fool.  And then went on to thrust into that half-second of suspended fury, a faint breath of appeasing.  “But—­don’t you see—­it’s my duty—­”

“You go—?” she said clearly.

Even in that moment he had a sharp prescience of the unwisdom of his rejection.  A cold calculator of chance and probabilities would have reckoned that a half hour of assuagement here would have been a wiser investment of his mortal moments than any virtuous plunge into single-hearted duty.

But Ryder did not calculate.  He could not, with Aimee under that beast’s hand.  His heart and soul were possessed with her danger and his heart and soul carried his body instinctively back from the dancing girl’s advance, and he whispered, “I must go.  There is no time—­”

She flung back her fiery-hued head with a gesture of intolerable rage.  Her eyes were lightnings.

“Dog of a Christian!” she said chokingly and flew to the doors.

Back she thrust the heavy hangings, turning a quick key in the lock and wrenching the door wide.  And before Ryder could understand, before he could bring himself to realize that she was not simply violently expelling him from her room, she gave a shriek that rang wildly down the long-unseen corridors.

At the top of her lungs, with one hand out to thrust him back or cling to him if he attempted to pass, she shrieked again and again.

Instantly there came a running of feet.

CHAPTER XIX

AN INTERRUPTION

When Hamdi Bey had taken Aimee back to her apartments he pulled sharply upon a bellcord.  In a few moments the slave woman, Fatima, made her appearance, no kindly-eyed old crone like Miriam, but a sallow, furtive-faced creature, with an old disfiguring scar across a cheek.