, on the carpet, and beside him stood another
man, whom I recognized as Ayesha's special attendant,--an Indian.
'Haroun is dead,' said Ayesha. 'Search for that which will give thee new
life. Thou hast seen, and wilt know it, not I.'

"And I put my hand on the breast of Haroun--for the dead man was he--and
drew from it the vessel of crystal.

"Having done so, the frown of his marble brow appalled me. I staggered
back, and swooned away.

"I came to my senses, recovering and rejoicing, miles afar from the
city, the dawn red on its distant wall. Ayesha had tended me; the elixir
had already restored me.

"My first thought, when full consciousness came back to me, rested
on Louis Grayle, for he also had been at Aleppo; I was but one of his
numerous train. He, too, was enfeebled and suffering; he had sought the
known skill of Haroun for himself as for me; and this woman loved and
had tended him as she had loved and tended me. And my nurse told me that
he was dead, and forbade me henceforth to breathe his name.

"We travelled on,--she and I, and the Indian her servant,--my strength
still renewed by the wondrous elixir. No longer supported by her, what
gazelle ever roved through its pasture with a bound more elastic than
mine?

"We came to a town, and my nurse placed before me a mirror. I did not
recognize myself. In this town we rested, obscure, till the letter there
reached me by which I learned that I was the offspring of love, and
enriched by the care of a father recently dead. Is it not clear that
Louis Grayle was this father?"

"If so, was the woman Ayesha your mother?"

"The letter said that 'my mother had died in my infancy.' Nevertheless,
the care with which Ayesha had tended me induced a suspicion that made
me ask her the very question you put. She wept when I asked her, and
said, 'No, only my nurse. And now I needed a nurse no more.' The day
after I received the letter which announced an inheritance that allowed
me to vie with the nobles of Europe, this woman left me, and went back
to her tribe."

"Have you never seen her since?"

Margrave hesitated a moment, and then answered, though with seeming
reluctance, "Yes, at Damascus. Not many days after I was borne to that
city by the strangers who found me half-dead on their road, I woke one
morning to find her by my side. And she said, 'In joy and in health you
did not need me. I am needed now."'

"Did you then deprive yourself of one so devoted? You have no