voice melodious as a viol. "Can sorrow
burden thine and mine go light?" she wooed him. "Is happiness possible
to me when thou art downcast? In there I felt thy melancholy, and thy
need of me, and I am come to share thy burden, or to bear it all for
thee." Her arms were raised, and her fingers interlocked themselves upon
his shoulder.

He looked down at her, and his expression softened. He needed comfort,
and never was she more welcome to him.

Gradually and with infinite skill she drew from him the story of what
had happened. When she had gathered it, she loosed her indignation.

"The dog!" she cried. "The faithless, ungrateful hound! Yet have I
warned thee against him, O light of my poor eyes, and thou hast scorned
me for the warnings uttered by my love. Now at last thou knowest him,
and he shall trouble thee no longer. Thou'lt cast him off, reduce him
again to the dust from which thy bounty raised him."

But Asad did not respond. He sat there in a gloomy abstraction, staring
straight before him. At last he sighed wearily. He was just, and he had
a conscience, as odd a thing as it was awkward in a corsair Basha.

"In what hath befallen," he answered moodily, "there is naught to
justify me in casting aside the stoutest soldier of Islam. My duty to
Allah will not suffer it."

"Yet his duty to thee suffered him to thwart thee, O my lord," she
reminded him very softly.

"In my desires--ay!" he answered, and for a moment his voice quivered
with passion. Then he repressed it, and continued more calmly--"Shall
my self-seeking overwhelm my duty to the Faith? Shall the matter of
a slave-girl urge me to sacrifice the bravest soldier of Islam, the
stoutest champion of the Prophet's law? Shall I bring down upon my
head the vengeance of the One by destroying a man who is a scourge of
scorpions unto the infidel--and all this that I may gratify my personal
anger against him, that I may avenge the thwarting of a petty desire?"

"Dost thou still say, O my life, that Sakr-el-Bahr is the stoutest
champion of the Prophet's law?" she asked him softly, yet on a note of
amazement.

"It is not I that say it, but his deeds," he answered sullenly.

"I know of one deed no True-Believer could have wrought. If proof were
needed of his infidelity he hath now afforded it in taking to himself
a Nasrani wife. Is it not written in the Book to be Read: 'Marry not
idolatresses'? Is not that the Prophet's law, and hath he not broken
it, offen