Here Paula broke in.  She did not know what the malicious man was going to say, but it was something insulting beyond a doubt.  And there stood Orion, just as she had pictured him in moments of tender remembrance; she felt his eye resting on her in ecstasy.  To go up to him, to tell him all she was feeling in this critical struggle for life or death, seemed impossible; but as the Vekeel began to disclose to their judges matters which concerned only herself and her lover, every impulse prompted her to interpose and, in this fateful hour, to do her friend such service as she once, like a coward, had shrank from.  So with eager emotion, her eyes flashing, she interrupted the negro “Stop!” she cried, “you are wasting words and trouble.  What you are trying to prove by subtlety I am proud and glad to declare.  Hear it, all of you.  The son of the Mukaukas is my betrothed!”

At the same time her eye sought to meet Orion’s.  And thus, in the very extremity of danger, they enjoyed a solemn moment of the purest, deepest happiness.  Paula’s eyes were moist with grateful tenderness, when Orion exclaimed: 

“You have heard from her own lips what makes the greatest bliss of my life.  The noble daughter of Thomas is my promised bride!”

There was a murmur among the Jacobite judges.  ’Till this moment several of them, oppressed by the heat, had sat dreaming with their heads sunk on their breasts, but now they were suddenly as wide-awake and alert as though a jet of cold water had been turned on to them, and one cried out:  “And your father, young man?  You have forgotten him in a hurry!  What would he have said to such a disgrace to his blood as your marriage to a Melchite, the daughter of those who caused your two brothers to be murdered?  Oh! if the dead could. . . .”

“He blessed our union on his death-bed,” Orion put in.

“Did he, indeed?” asked another Jacobite with sarcastic scorn.  “Then the patriarch was in the right when he refused to let the priests follow his corpse.  That I should live to be witness to such crimes!”

But such words fell on the ears of the enraptured pair like the chirping of crickets.  They felt, they cared for nothing but what this blissful moment had brought them, and never suspected that Paula’s glad avowal had sealed her death-warrant.

The wrath of the Jacobite faction now hastened the end.  The prosecutor, an Arab, now represented how many Moslems had lost their lives in the affair of the nuns, and once more read Orion’s letter.  His Christian colleagues tried to prove that this document could only refer to the flight, so ingeniously plotted, of the sisters; and now something quite new and unlooked-for occurred, which gave a fresh turn to the proceedings:  the old man interrupted the Kadi to make a statement.  At this Paula’s confidence rose again for the last speaker had somewhat shaken it.  She felt sure that the tried friend and adoptive father of her faithful Philippus would take her part.