purchase a messenger from us for this errand?" pursued their leader. He
had been reared as a boy in the high tenets and the pure chivalries of
the school of Abd-el-Kader; and they were not lost in him, despite the
crimes and the desperation of his life.

She held the paper out to him, with a passionate entreaty breaking
through the enforced calm of despair with which she had hitherto spoken.

"Cut me in ten thousand pieces with your swords, but save him, as you
are brave men, as you are generous foes!"

With a single sign of his hand their leader waved them back where they
crowded around her, and leaped down from his saddle, and led the horse
he had dismounted to her.

"Maiden," he said gently, "we are Arabs, but we are not brutes. We swore
to avenge ourselves on an enemy; we are not vile enough to accept a
martyrdom. Take my horse--he is the swiftest of my troop--and go you on
your errand. You are safe from me."

She looked at him in stupor; the sense of his words was not tangible
to her; she had had no hope, no thought, that they would ever deal thus
with her; all she had ever dreamed of was so to touch their hearts and
their generosity that they would spare one from among their troop to do
the errand of mercy she had begged of them.

"You play with me!" she murmured, while her lips grew whiter and her
great eyes larger in the intensity of her emotion. "Ah! for pity's sake,
make haste and kill me, so that this only may reach him!"

The chief, standing by her, lifted her up in his sinewy arms, up on to
the saddle of his charger. His voice was very solemn, his glance was
very gentle; all the nobility of the highest Arab nature was aroused
in him at the heroism of a child, a girl, an infidel--one, in his sight
abandoned and shameful among her sex.

"Go in peace," he said simply; "it is not with such as thee that we
war."

Then, and then only, as she felt the fresh reins placed in her hand, and
saw the ruthless horde around her fall back and leave her free, did she
understand his meaning; did she comprehend that he gave her back both
liberty and life, and, with the surrender of the horse he loved, the
noblest and most precious gift that the Arab ever bestows or ever
receives. The unutterable joy seemed to blind her, and gleam upon her
face like the blazing light of noon, as she turned her burning eyes full
on him.

"Ah! now I believe that thine Allah rules thee, equally with Christians!
If I live, thou shalt