The man’s hands lay quietly on his knees as he leant forward, and the shadow thrown by the flowering plants hid the twin pools of murder in the depths of his eyes.

“And------?” he whispered.

“And------” she whispered back, “would the white man, thinkest thou,
take to wife her who had passed a night in the house of the courtesan? 
Would he not, without waiting for explanation, throw her into the filth
of the bazaar, leaving her for the first comer to pick up, and turn
himself to------”

She leapt to her feet, screaming, as his fingers closed round her wrist in a grip of steel; mad with fury, she tore her raiment and hair, raving obscenities in the vilest language of the lowest reaches of the bazaar, oblivious of the dogs which reared and fell and reared unceasingly behind her.

“The white woman who trapeses the bazaar unveiled,” she screamed.  “The white virgin who flung herself into thy arms, in the market-place, thou trafficker in foreign harlots, the------”

Hugh Carden Ali, the son of his father to the inner-most part of his being in the horrible scene, had made one little sign, and the dogs were upon her.

With a sickening scrunch one caught the side of her head in the steel jaws which stretched from the nape of the neck to the corner of the mouth; with a sharp snap the other drove its fangs into the muscle behind the dimpled knee.

They pulled her down and stood stock-still, as these dogs are trained to do; then with crimson saliva dripping from the jaws, crimson lights shining in the eyes, let go their hold and stood looking alternately from master to quarry, with slowly wagging tails.

There was no sign of anger in the man as he sat tranquilly upon the cushions, the amber mouthpiece of the nargileh between his lips; no sound of wrath in the gentle voice which bid the Ethiopian eunuch to remain prostrated upon the floor, until the arrival of the other slaves, who could be heard pelting through the house from every direction in answer to the summons of the gong.

“Idrabuh,” he said quietly to four of the terror-stricken domestic staff, pointing to the eunuch.  “Upon the soles of the feet so that he walketh not for many a day—­if ever.”  And as the wretch was dragged screaming from the room, he beckoned to four others, and pointed to the body of the woman.  “Carry that out and throw it in the street, in such wise that it is not known from whence it came.  Touch not the jewels, lest thou sharest thy brother’s fate.”

With falcon upon wrist and blood-stained dogs at his heels, he passed out of the ill-fated court to his own apartment, and, having bathed and dressed himself, to his body-servant’s grief, in hot, European riding-kit, with boots from Peter Yapp, tucked the cleansed dogs of Billi in beside him, and raced his car to the Obelisk which is all that remains upright of the Biblical City of On.

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