It had come to Zulannah, uncontrollably, that night when, unveiled, garbed in silks and satins and hung with jewels, she brazenly graced the stage-box at a gala performance.

She looked down, and Ben Kelham, in the end seat of the first row of stalls, looked up and looked and looked, seeing nothing, being blinded with love of Damaris.

Zulannah drove back in her Rolls-Royce to the edge of the Arabian quarter, where, owing to the narrowness of the lanes called by courtesy streets, she alighted to finish what remained of the journey in a litter swung from the shoulders of four Nubian slaves, and, arrived at the great house, summoned her special bodyguard, Qatim the Ethiopian; and for acquiring information down to the smallest detail about some special individual there is, surely, no detective agency on earth to compare to one ordinary, native servant.

He loves intrigue!

So that, twenty-four hours later, Zulannah laughed shrilly when Qatim the Ethiopian repeated all he had learned of the white man and the white maid he presumably loved.

“Love!” she scoffed.  “He has not met me!”

But in the weeks that followed no plot had succeeded, no device or subtle invitation had lured the bird to the list, so that she beat sharply upon a silver gong this night of the stars, upon which the Ethiopian came running hastily to cast himself upon the ground at the jewelled, henna’d feet.

“Get up,” she said, kicking him upon the side of the head; whereupon he rose, chalking up one more mark on his own particular slate of Life, upon one side of which was written Desire and the other Revenge.

He stood six-foot-four in his loin-cloth, as black and glistening as a polished ebony statue.  The enormous hands at the end of great, over-long arms almost touched his knees; the chest and shoulders and abdomen were hard as iron, rippling with muscle under the oiled skin; the feet were huge and pink of sole, and the animality of the man was intensified by a certain gleam of intelligence somewhere in the impassive negroid face.

The woman, took no notice of the magnificent physique; it neither repulsed nor attracted her—­he was a slave.

“Run and give orders that no one is admitted!  Hasten!”

“Mistress, a great noble waits at-----”

“Desirest thou thy tongue split, thou black dog, that thou answerest Zulannah?  Haste thee, and return!”

And far into the night they talked, those two, planning death or destruction, anything as long as it attained the desire of the woman who, looking into the future, took no notice of the mountain of disaster beside her in the shape of the Ethiopian who desired and hated her with all the bestial passion of his race.

Then, just as far down in the east the sky lightened, she sat suddenly upright and clapped her jewelled hands.