expressions of pity; simply they desired her to appear fresh and
attractive when they carried her into the slave mart.

In fitful dreams all that had happened came back to her--the story her
father had told about saving the old king's life, and the grim,
ironical gratitude in making Colonel Hare his heir--as if such things
could be! And then her own journey to Allaha; the nightmarish durbar,
during which she had been crowned; the escape from the ordeals with
John Bruce; the terrors of the temple of the sun; the flight from there
. . . John Bruce! She could still see the fire in his eyes; she could
still feel the touch of his gentle yet tireless hand. Would she ever
see him again?

On the way to the mart they passed under the shadow of the grim prison
walls of the palace. The elephants veered off here into a side street,
toward the huge square where horses and cattle and elephants were
bought and sold. The litter, in charge of the chief mahout, proceeded
to the slave mart. Kathlyn glanced at the wall, wondering. Was her
father alive? Was he in some bleak cell behind that crumbling masonry?
Did he know that she was here? Or was he really dead? Ah, perhaps it
were better that death should have taken him--better that than having
his living heart wrung by the tale of his daughter's unspeakable
miseries.

Even as she sent a last lingering look at the prison the prisoner
within, his head buried in his thin wasted hands, beheld her in a
vision--but in a happy, joyous vision, busying about the living room of
the bungalow.

And far away a younger man beheld a vision as very tenderly he gazed at
Kathlyn's discarded robe and resumed his determined quest. Often,
standing beside his evening fires, he would ask the silence, "Kathlyn,
where are you?" Even then he was riding fast toward Allaha.

A slave mart is a rare thing these days, but at the time these scenes
were being enacted there existed many of them here and there across the
face of the globe. Men buy and sell men and women these
times--enlightened, so they say--but they do it by legal contract or
from vile hiding places.

Allaha had been a famous mart in its prime. It had drawn the agents of
princes from all over India. Persia, Beloochistan, Afghanistan, and
even southern Russia had been rifled of their beauties to adorn the
zenanas of the slothful Hindu princes.

The slave mart in the capital town of Allaha stood in the center of the
bazaars, a grea