“A little leisure and a little gold, and your raw colonist, too, will have the tastes of a pasha.”

I made no answer.  I had ceased to care who and what was my tempter.  To me his whole being was resolved into one problem:  had he a secret by which death could be turned from Lilian?

But now, as the litter halted, from the long, dark shadow which it cast upon the turf, the figure of a woman emerged and stood before us.  The outlines of her shape were lost in the loose folds of a black mantle, and the features of her face were hidden by a black veil, except only the dark-bright, solemn eyes.  Her stature was lofty, her bearing majestic, whether in movement or repose.

Margrave accosted her in some language unknown to me.  She replied in what seemed to me the same tongue.  The tones of her voice were sweet, but inexpressibly mournful.  The words that they uttered appeared intended to warn, or deprecate, or dissuade; but they called to Margrave’s brow a lowering frown, and drew from his lips a burst of unmistakable anger.  The woman rejoined, in the same melancholy music of voice.  And Margrave then, leaning his arm upon her shoulder, as he had leaned it on mine, drew her away from the group into a neighboring copse of the flowering eucalypti—­mystic trees, never changing the hues of their pale-green leaves, ever shifting the tints of their ash-gray, shedding bark.  For some moments I gazed on the two human forms, dimly seen by the glinting moonlight through the gaps in the foliage.  Then turning away my eyes, I saw, standing close at my side, a man whom I had not noticed before.  His footstep, as it stole to me, had fallen on the sward without sound.  His dress, though Oriental, differed from that of his companions, both in shape and color—­fitting close to the breast, leaving the arms bare to the elbow, and of a uniform ghastly white, as are the cerements of the grave.  His visage was even darker than those of the Syrians or Arabs behind him, and his features were those of a bird of prey:  the beak of the eagle, but the eye of the vulture.  His cheeks were hollow; the arms, crossed on his breast, were long and fleshless.  Yet in that skeleton form there was a something which conveyed the idea of a serpent’s suppleness and strength; and as the hungry, watchful eyes met my own startled gaze, I recoiled impulsively with that inward warning of danger which is conveyed to man, as to inferior animals, in the very aspect of the creatures that sting or devour.  At my movement the man inclined his head in the submissive Eastern salutation, and spoke in his foreign tongue, softly, humbly, fawningly, to judge by his tone and his gesture.