erstand
you aright that you are an English woman and have been here for
sixty years?"

The old woman nodded her head affirmatively. "For sixty years I
have never been outside of this palace. Come," she said, stretching
forth a bony hand. "I am very old and cannot stand long. Come and
sit with me on my couch."

The girl took the proffered hand and assisted the old lady back
to the opposite side of the room and when she was seated the girl
sat down beside her.

"Poor child! Poor child!" moaned the old woman. "Far better to have
died than to have let them bring you here. At first I might have
destroyed myself but there was always the hope that someone would
come who would take me away, but none ever comes. Tell me how they
got you."

Very briefly the girl narrated the principal incidents which led
up to her capture by some of the creatures of the city.

"Then there is a man with you in the city?" asked the old woman.

"Yes," said the girl, "but I do not know where he is nor what are
their intentions in regard to him. In fact, I do not know what
their intentions toward me are."

"No one might even guess," said the old woman. "They do not know
themselves from one minute to the next what their intentions are,
but I think you can rest assured, my poor child, that you will
never see your friend again."

"But they haven't slain you," the girl reminded her, "and you have
been their prisoner, you say, for sixty years."

"No," replied her companion, "they have not killed me, nor will
they kill you, though God knows before you have lived long in this
horrible place you will beg them to kill you."

"Who are they--" asked Bertha Kircher, "what kind of people? They
differ from any that I ever have seen. And tell me, too, how you
came here."

"It was long ago," said the old woman, rocking back and forth on
the couch. "It was long ago. Oh, how long it was! I was only twenty
then. Think of it, child! Look at me. I have no mirror other than
my bath, I cannot see what I look like for my eyes are old, but
with my fingers I can feel my old and wrinkled face, my sunken eyes,
and these flabby lips drawn in over toothless gums. I am old and
bent and hideous, but then I was young and they said that I was
beautiful. No, I will not be a hypocrite; I was beautiful. My glass
told me that.

"My father was a missionary in the interior and one day there came
a band of Arabian slave raiders. They took the men and women of
the little n