s that Jinny could make would do no good.
Jinny could only report that he had maintained a disguise at a
wedding reception, and talked a few moments, apparently undetected,
to a bride. Hamdi Bey, and Hamdi's eunuchs, would be blandly
ignorant of such a scandal. What his disappearance would indicate
would be some further frolic on his part, some tempting of a later
Providence before he had abandoned his disguise.... If he were
discovered, for instance, in some of those native quarters, behind a
woman's veil....

Decidedly the only effect of Jinny's revelations would be an
unsavory cloud upon his character.

There was no hope to be looked for.

And yet he could not believe it. There were moments when the black
terror mastered him, but involuntarily his young strength shook it
off. He could not believe in its reality. He could not believe that
he was actually here, bricked and bound, in this infernal coffin....

But, indisputably, the evidence was in favor of belief.... Only to
believe was to feel again that horror....

He tried to tell himself that it didn't matter. One had to die some
time. Everybody did. One might as well go out young and strong and
still interested in life.

But that was remarkably cold comfort. He didn't want to go out at
all. He didn't want to die, not for fifty or sixty years yet, and of
all the ways of dying, he wanted least to smother and choke and
stifle like a rat walled in its hole in the wall.

He recalled, with peculiar pain, a woodchuck that he had penned up
as a boy, and he hoped with extraordinary passion that the poor
beast had made another hole. Never again, he resolved, would he pen
up a living creature, never again, if only again he could see the
light of day and breathe the free air....

He thought of Aimee. And when he thought of her his heart seemed to
turn to water. Useless to repeat to himself now those old reminders
that he had seen her so little, known her so slightly. Useless to
measure that strange feeling that drew him by any artifice of time
and acquaintance.

She was Aimee. She was enchantment and delight. She was appeal and
tenderness. She was blind longing and mystery. She was beauty and
desire....

Even to think of her now, in the infernal horror of this cramping
grave, was to feel his heart quicken and his blood grow hot in a
helpless passion of dread and fear. She was alone, there, helpless,
with that madman.

He tried to tell himself that she was not w