th came the message that
he would always be working for our happiness. Well I guessed what he
meant! Yet when my father told me about Tahar, all my faith in Manoeel
could not keep me brave. My father is splendid, but he will stop at
nothing with those who go against him. At first he said I must be
married when I was sixteen, but I reminded him that seventeen was my
mother's age when he took her; and I begged him, "for luck," to let me
wait. I dared not warn Manoeel, lest they should have laid a trap,
expecting me to write him about my marriage. I waited for months, and
then it was too late, for Ali ben Sliman was away. I dared trust no one
else; and so it is not yet a year ago that I sent a letter to an old
address Manoeel had left with Ali. I told him all that had happened, and
I said, if I were to be saved it must be before my seventeenth birthday,
the end of September. After that I should be dead--or else Tahar's wife.
Since then, not hearing, I have sent two more letters to the same
address, for I have no other. But no answer has come. Now Ali has died
of fever, and I can never write to Manoeel again unless--unless----"

"Unless what?" breathed Sanda.

"Unless you can manage to help me. _Would_ you, if you could?"

"Yes," answered the other girl, without hesitating. "I'm a guest in the
Agha's house, and I've eaten his salt, so it's hateful to work against
him. But, some day, surely he'll be thankful to a friend who saves you
from Si Tahar. I'll do anything I can. Yet I'm only a girl like
yourself. What is there I _can_ do? Have you thought?"

"_If_ I have thought!" echoed Ourieda. "I have thought of nothing else,
for weeks and weeks, long before you came. I begged my father to find me
a companion of my own age, not an Arab girl, but a European, to teach
me things and make me clever like my mother. He believed I was pining
with ennui; and because he had put real happiness out of my life, he was
willing to console me as well as he could in some easy way. In spite of
Aunt Mabrouka, who may have guessed what was in my mind, he trusts you
completely, because you are your father's daughter."

"Ah, that's the dreadful part! To betray such a trust!" exclaimed Sanda.

"But after all, I am going to ask so little of you, not a hard thing at
all," Ourieda pleaded, frightened at the effect of her own words. "It is
a thing only a trusted guest, a woman of the Roumia, could possibly do,
yet it's very simple. And when the time