his tone and his gesture.

I moved yet farther away from him with loathing, and now the human
thought flashed upon me: was I, in truth, exposed to no danger in
trusting myself to the mercy of the weird and remorseless master of
those hirelings from the East--seven men in number, two at least of
them formidably armed, and docile as bloodhounds to the hunter, who
has only to show them their prey? But fear of man like myself is
not my weakness; where fear found its way to my heart, it was
through the doubts or the fancies in which man like myself
disappeared in the attributes, dark and unknown, which we give to a
fiend or a specter. And, perhaps, if I could have paused to
analyze my own sensations, the very presence of this escort--
creatures of flesh and blood--lessened the dread of my
incomprehensible tempter. Rather, a hundred times, front and defy
those seven Eastern slaves--I, haughty son of the Anglo-Saxon who
conquers all races because he fears no odds--than have seen again
on the walls of my threshold the luminous, bodiless shadow!
Besides: Lilian--Lilian! for one chance of saving her life, however
wild and chimerical that chance might be, I would have shrunk not a
foot from the march of an army.

Thus reassured and thus resolved, I advanced, with a smile of
disdain, to meet Margrave and his veiled companion, as they now
came from the moonlit copse.

"Well," I said to him, with an irony that unconsciously mimicked
his own, "have you taken advice with your nurse? I assume that the
dark form by your side is that of Ayesha!"*