lance of which the poet sings--the glance that cost him
a thousand sighs. I was on fire with impatience.... For I am
beauty's slave, little dove.... You may have heard--but no matter. A
wife must be a pearl unspotted.... I am not as the English who take
their wives from the highways, where all men's glances have rested
upon them. Have I not been at their balls? Their women dance in
other men's arms. They marry wives whose hands other men have
pressed. Sometimes--who knows?--their lips have been kissed.... And
then a husband takes her.... Oh, many thanks!"

He laughed sardonically and waved his hands a little wildly. "Oh, I
know English--all the Europeans. I have seen their women. I have
seen them selling their wares--stripping themselves half bare in the
evenings, the shameless--For me, never! My wife is a hidden
treasure. You know what the poet says:

"'An' there be one who shares with me her love
I'd strangle Love tho' Life by Love were slain,
Saying, O Soul, Death were the nobler choice,
For ill is Love when shared twixt partners twain.'"

"You are fond of your poets," said Aimee with stiff lips.

"You--you kindle poetic fires, my little one. You--I--" He stammered
a moment, then forgot his fierce speech against foreign ways. "You
have the raven hair--"

His hand went out to it. He smoothed it back out of her eyes, then
tried to draw her to him.

Desperately she resisted. "Monsieur, one does not expect a
gentleman--"

"Expect! Ho--what should one expect when a man has such a little
sweetmeat, such a little syrup drop, such a rose petal--Come, come,
you would not struggle--"

But it was not the struggling hand of the frightened girl that sent
the general back.

It was a brown, sinewy hand on his shoulder, a hand protruding from
a well tailored gray sleeve and lilac striped cuff, that caught
Hamdi Bey by the epauleted shoulder and sent him spinning about.

Another hand was holding a revolver very directly at him.

"Silence!" said Jack Ryder in his best Turkish and repeated it, with
amplification, in English. "Not a sound--or I'll blow your head
off."

Aimee gave a strangled gasp.

He had not gone, then! He had hidden there, in some nook of that
boudoir behind those shadowy curtains, waiting to protect her, to
rescue....

Over one arm he had the black mantle and veil, "Better put these
on," he suggested, without taking his eyes from the rigid bey, "and
then run for it."