eless in his solitary home, and, according to
popular rumour, marks on his throat betrayed the murderous hand of the
strangler. Simultaneously, Louis Grayle had disappeared from the city,
and was supposed to have shared the fate of Haroun, and been secretly
buried by the assassins who had deprived him of life. Sir Philip
hastened to Aleppo. There he ascertained that on the night in which
Haroun died, Grayle did not disappear alone; with him were also missing
two of his numerous suite,--the one, an Arab woman, named Ayesha, who
had for some years been his constant companion, his pupil and associate
in the mystic practices to which his intellect had been debased, and who
was said to have acquired a singular influence over him, partly by
her beauty and partly by the tenderness with which she had nursed him
through his long decline; the other, an Indian, specially assigned
to her service, of whom all the wild retainers of Grayle spoke with
detestation and terror. He was believed by them to belong to that
murderous sect of fanatics whose existence as a community has only
recently been made known to Europe, and who strangle their unsuspecting
victim in the firm belief that they thereby propitiate the favour of the
goddess they serve. The current opinion at Aleppo was, that if those
two persons had conspired to murder Haroun, perhaps for the sake of the
treasures he was said to possess, it was still more certain that they
had made away with their own English lord, whether for the sake of the
jewels he wore about him, or for the sake of treasures less doubtful
than those imputed to Haroun, and of which the hiding-place would be to
them much better known.

"I did not share that opinion," wrote the narrator, "for I assured
myself that Ayesha sincerely loved her awful master; and that love
need excite no wonder, for Louis Grayle was one whom if a woman, and
especially a woman of the East, had once loved, before old age and
infirmity fell on him, she would love and cherish still more devotedly
when it became her task to protect the being who, in his day of power
and command, had exalted his slave into the rank of his pupil and
companion. And the Indian whom Grayle had assigned to her service was
allowed to have that brute kind of fidelity which, though it recoils
from no crime for a master, refuses all crime against him.

"I came to the conclusion that Haroun had been murdered by order