icholas at Penarrow and enlist his aid to obtain possession of that
document, if it still existed.

Then Sakr-el-Bahr found means to conduct Pitt to Genoa, and there put
him aboard an English vessel.

Three months later he received an answer--a letter from Pitt, which
reached him by way of Genoa--which was at peace with the Algerines, and
served then as a channel of communication with Christianity. In this
letter Pitt informed him that he had done all that Sir Oliver had
desired him; that he had found the document by the help of Nicholas, and
that in person he had waited upon Mistress Rosamund Godolphin, who dwelt
now with Sir John Killigrew at Arwenack, delivering to her the letter
and the parchment; but that upon learning on whose behalf he came she
had in his presence flung both unopened upon the fire and dismissed him
with his tale untold.

Sakr-el-Bahr spent the night under the skies in his fragrant orchard,
and his slaves reported in terror that they had heard sobs and weeping.
If indeed his heart wept, it was for the last time; thereafter he was
more inscrutable, more ruthless, cruel and mocking than men had ever
known him, nor from that day did he ever again concern himself to
manumit a single English slave. His heart was become a stone.

Thus five years passed, counting from that spring night when he was
trepanned by Jasper Leigh, and his fame spread, his name became a terror
upon the seas, and fleets put forth from Malta, from Naples, and from
Venice to make an end of him and his ruthless piracy. But Allah kept
watch over him, and Sakr-el-Bahr never delivered battle but he wrested
victory to the scimitars of Islam.

Then in the spring of that fifth year there came to him another letter
from the Cornish Pitt, a letter which showed him that gratitude was
not as dead in the world as he supposed it, for it was purely out of
gratitude that the lad whom he had delivered from thraldom wrote to
inform him of certain matters that concerned him. This letter reopened
that old wound; it did more; it dealt him a fresh one. He learnt from it
that the writer had been constrained by Sir John Killigrew to give such
evidence of Sir Oliver's conversion to Islam as had enabled the courts
to pronounce Sir Oliver as one to be presumed dead at law, granting the
succession to his half-brother, Master Lionel Tressilian. Pitt professed
himself deeply mortified at having been forced unwittingly to make Sir
Oliver so evil a return f