aid it on the
eve of crime. Even an Eurasian rat has emotions. And Ferez had
been in love with Nihla many years, and was selling her now at a
price--selling her and Adolf Gerhardt and the Count d'Eblis and
France--all he had to barter--for he had sold his soul too long
ago to remember even what he got for it.

The silence seemed more intense for the sounds that made it audible.
From, the unlighted cities on the seven hills came an unbroken howling
of dogs; transparent waves of the limpid Bosphorus slapped the
vessel's sides, making a mellow and ceaseless clatter. Far away beyond
Galata Quay, in the inner reek of unseen Stamboul, the notes of a
Turkish flute stole out across the darkness, where some Tzigane--some
unseen wretch in rags--was playing the melancholy song of Mourad. And,
mournfully responsive to the reedy complaint of a homeless wanderer
from a nation without a home, the homeless dogs of Islam wailed their
miserere under the Prophet's moon.

The tragic wolf-song wavered from hill to hill; from the Fields of the
Dead to the Seven Towers, from Kassim to Tophane, seeming to swell
into one dreadful, endless plaint:

"My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"

"And me!" muttered Ferez, shivering in the windy vapours from the
Black Sea, which already dampened his face with their creeping summer
chill.

"Ferez!"

He turned slowly. Swathed in a white wool bernous, Nihla stood there
in the foggy moonlight.

"Why?" she enquired, without preliminaries and with the unfeigned
curiosity of a child.

He did not pretend to misunderstand her in French:

"Thou knowest, Nihla. I have never touched thy heart. I could do
nothing for thee----"

"Except to sell me," she smiled, interrupting him in English, without
the slightest trace of accent.

But Ferez preferred the refuge of French:

"Except to launch thee and make possible thy career," he corrected her
very gently.

"I thought you were in love with me?"

"I have loved thee, Nihla, since thy childhood."

"Is there anything on earth or in paradise, Ferez, that you would not
sell for a price?"

"I tell thee----"

"Zut! I know thee, Ferez!" she mocked him, slipping easily into
French. "What was my price? Who pays thee, Colonel Ferez? This big,
shambling, world-wearied Count, who is, nevertheless, afraid of me?
Did he pay thee? Or was it this rich American, Gerhardt? Or was it
Von-der-Goltz? Or Excellenz?"

"Nihla! Thou knowest me----"

Her clear, untroubled