The memory of that insolent moment when a man’s hand had gripped him, had whirled him from Aimee—­when a man’s voice and gun had threatened him—­that memory was too overpowering for even his triumph over the invader to lay wholly its smart of outrage.

He felt again the tightening of his nerves, like quivering wires, as he crossed the violated reception room and entered the boudoir.  It was empty, but on the divan the flickering candle light revealed the damp, spreading stain where Aimee’s drenched satins had been.

He thrust aside a hanging and pushed open the door into the room beyond.

It was a small bedroom evidently very recently furnished in new and white shining lacquer of French design, elaborately inlaid with painted porcelains and draped with a profusion of rosy taffeta.  Among this elegance, surprisingly unrelated to the ancient paneled walls, stood the hastily opened trunk and bags of the bride, their raised lids and disarranged trays heaped with the confusion of unaccustomed, swiftly searching hands.

Aimee herself, in a gay little French boudoir robe of jade and citron, sat huddled in a chair, like a mute, terrified child, in the hand of her dresser, who was shaking out the long, damp hair and fanning it with a peacock fan.

At the bey’s entrance Fatima suspended the fanning, but with easy familiarity exhibited the long ringlets.

Curtly the bey nodded, and gestured in dismissal; the woman laid down her fan, and with a last slant-eyed look at that strangely still new mistress she went noiselessly out a small service door.

With an air of negligent assurance Hamdi Bey gazed about the room and yawned.  “Truly a fatiguing evening,” he remarked in his dry, sardonic voice.  “But you look so untouched!  What a thing is radiant youth.”

He sauntered over to her, who drew a little closer together at his approach, and lifted one of the long dark curls that the serving woman had exhibited.

“The ringlets of loveliness,” he murmured.  “You know the old saying of the Sadi?  ’The ringlets of the lovely are a chain on the feet of reason and a snare for the bird of wisdom.’...  How long ago he said it—­and how true to-day ...  Yet such a charming chain!  Suppose, then, I forgive you, little one, since sages have forgiven beauty before?”

She was silent, her eyes fixed on him with the silent terror with which a trapped bird sees its captor, in their bright darkness the same mute apprehension, the same filming of helpless despair.

Ryder was dead, she thought.  This cruel, incensed old madman had killed him, for all his oaths.  Somewhere beneath those ancient stones he was lying drowned and dead, a strange, pitiable addition to the dark secrets of those grim walls.

He had died for her sake, and all that she asked now of life, she thought in the utter agony of her youth, was death.  And very quickly.

“I am so soft hearted,” he sighed, still with that ringlet in his lifted hand, his hand which wanted palpably to settle upon her and yet was withheld by some strange inhibition of those fixed, helpless eyes.  “Who knows—­perhaps I may forgive you yet?  You might persuade me—­”