omething might be he could form no notion. It was the
first time that Barbary rovers were seen in England. That famous raid
of theirs upon Baltimore in Ireland did not take place until some thirty
years after this date.

"Sir Oliver Tressilian!" Killigrew gasped, and "Sir Oliver Tressilian!"
echoed Lord Henry Goade, to add "By God!"

"Not Sir Oliver Tressilian, came the answer, but Sakr-el-Bahr, the
scourge of the sea, the terror of Christendom, the desperate corsair
your lies, cupidity, and false-heartedness have fashioned out of a
sometime Cornish gentleman." He embraced them all in his denunciatory
gesture. "Behold me here with my sea-hawks to present a reckoning long
overdue."

Writing now of what his own eyes beheld, Lord Henry tells us how Sir
John leapt to snatch a weapon from the armoured walls; how Sakr-el-Bahr
barked out a single word in Arabic, and how at that word a half-dozen
of his supple blackamoors sprang upon the knight like greyhounds upon a
hare and bore him writhing to the ground.

Lady Henry screamed; her husband does not appear to have done anything,
or else modesty keeps him silent on the score of it. Rosamund, white
to the lips, continued to look on, whilst Lionel, overcome, covered his
face with his hands in sheer horror. One and all of them expected to see
some ghastly deed of blood performed there, coldly and callously as the
wringing of a capon's neck. But no such thing took place. The corsairs
merely turned Sir John upon his face, dragged his wrists behind him to
make them fast, and having performed that duty with a speedy, silent
dexterity they abandoned him.

Sakr-el-Bahr watched their performance with those grimly smiling eyes of
his. When it was done he spoke again and pointed to Lionel, who leapt up
in sudden terror, with a cry that was entirely inarticulate. Lithe brown
arms encircled him like a legion of snakes. Powerless, he was lifted
in the air and borne swiftly away. For an instant he found himself held
face to face with his turbaned brother. Into that pallid terror-stricken
human mask the renegade's eyes stabbed like two daggers. Then
deliberately and after the fashion of the Muslim he was become he spat
upon it.

"Away!" he growled, and through the press of corsairs that thronged the
hall behind him a lane was swiftly opened and Lionel was swallowed up,
lost to the view of those within the room.

"What murderous deed do you intend?" cried Sir John indomitably. He had
ri