t same instant a loud report rang through the room, and the
upraised crystal goblet was shivered into a thousand fragments in
Mukhtar's hand. Every one leaped from his place in terror. But
whichever way they looked there was nothing to be seen. The only
persons in the room were the three brothers and the damsels. Only at
the spot from whence the shot had proceeded a little round cloud of
bluish smoke was visible, which sluggishly dispersed. Nobody present
carried weapons, and there was no door or window there by which any
one could have got in.

From the minarets outside the muezzins proclaimed the prayer of dawn:
"La illah il Allah! Muhammad razul Allah!"--"There is no God but God,
and Muhammad is His Prophet!"

* * * * *

Ali Pasha did not pursue the fugitives. That day he was praying all
the morning. He locked himself up in his inmost apartments, that
nobody might see what he was doing. He now did what he had not done
for seventy years--he wept. For a whole hour his inflexible soul was
broken. So that woman whom he had loved better than life itself, she
forsooth had given the first signal of approaching misfortune, the
first sign of the coming struggle! Let it come! Let her veil be the
first banner to lead an army against Janina! Tepelenti would not
attempt to stay her in her flight. For one long hour he thought of
her, and this hour was an hour of weeping; and then he bethought him
of the approaching tempest which the prophetic voice had warned him
of, and his heart turned to stone at the thought. Ali Pasha was not
the man to cringe before danger; no, he was wont to meet it face to
face, and ask of it why it had tarried so long. He used even to send
occasionally for the _nimetullahita_ dervish who had been living a
long time in the fortress, and question him concerning the future. It
must not be supposed, indeed, that Tepelenti ever took advice from
anybody; but he would listen to the words of lunatics and soothsayers,
and liked to learn from magicians and astrologers, and their sayings
were not without influence upon his actions.

The dervish was a decrepit old man. Nobody knew how old he really was;
it was said that only by magic did he keep himself alive at all. Every
evening they laid him down on plates of copper and rubbed invigorating
balsam into his withered skeleton, and so he lived on from day to day.

Two dumb eunuchs now brought him in to Tepelenti, and, bending his
le