crave. Go down into the dark markets of the town. See the long, narrow,
sordid streets lined with the cheap commodities of the poor. Mark
how there is a sort of spangled gaiety, a reckless swing, a grinning
exultation in the grimy, sordid caravanserai. The cheap colours of the
shoddy open-air clothing-house, the blank faded green of the coster's
cart; the dark bluish-red of the butcher's stall--they all take on a
value not their own in the garish lights flaring down the markets of
the dusk. Pause to the shrill music of the street musician, hear the
tuneless voice of the grimy troubadour of the alley-ways; and then hark
to the one note that commands them all--the call which lightens up faces
sodden with base vices, eyes bleared with long looking into the dark
caverns of crime:

"Buy--buy--buy--buy--buy!"

That is the tune the piper pipes. We would buy, and behold, we must pay.
Then the lights go out, the voices stop, and only the dark tumultuous
streets surround us, and the grime of life is ours again. Whereupon we
go heavily to hard beds of despair, having eaten the cake we bought, and
now must pay for unto Penalty, the dark inordinate creditor. And anon
the morning comes, and then, at last, the evening when the triste
bazaars open again, and the strong of heart and nerve move not from
their doorways, but sit still in the dusk to watch the grim world go
by. But mostly they hurry out to the bazaars once more, answering to the
fevered call:

"Buy--buy--buy--buy--buy!"

And again they pay the price: and so on to the last foreclosure and the
immitigable end.

One of the two standing in the door of the ruined chapel on the Ecrehos
had the nature of those who buy but once and pay the price but once; the
other was of those who keep open accounts in the markets of life. The
one was the woman and the other was the man.

There was nothing conventional in their greeting. "You remembered me!"
he said eagerly, in English, thinking of yesterday.

"I shouldn't deserve to be here if I had forgotten," she answered
meaningly. "Perhaps you forget the sword of the Turk?" she added.

He laughed a little, his cheek flushed with pleasure. "I shouldn't
deserve to be here if I remembered--in the way you mean," he answered.

Her face was full of pleasure. "The worst of it is," she said, "I never
can pay my debt. I have owed it for eleven years, and if I should live
to be ninety I should still owe it."

His heart was beating hard and