compassion of the Moslems!"

She once more bowed good-night and left the room. Orion followed her;
come what might he must see her. But he returned a few minutes after,
breathing hard and with his teeth set. He had taken her hand, had tried
to tell her all a loving heart could find to say; but how sharply, how
icily had he been repulsed, with what an air of intolerable scorn had she
turned her back upon him! And now that he was in their midst again he
scarcely heard his father express his regrets that so painful a scene
should have occurred under his roof, while the Arab said that he could
quite understand why the daughter of Thomas should have been betrayed
to anger: the massacre of Abyla was quite inexcusable.

"But then," the old man went on, "in what war do not such things take
place? Even the Christian is not always master of himself: you yourself
I know, lost two promising sons--and who were the murderers? Christians
--your own fellow-believers. . ."

"The bitterest foes of my beliefs," said the governor slowly, and every
syllable was a calm and dignified reproof to the Moslem for supposing
that the creed of those who had killed his sons could be his. As he
spoke he opened his eyes wide with the look of those hard, opaquely-
glittering stones which his ancestors had been wont to set for eyes in
their portrait statues. But he suddenly closed them again and said
indifferently:

"At what price do you value your hanging? I have a fancy to buy it.
Name your lowest terms: I cannot bear to bargain."

"I had thought of asking five hundred thousand drachmae," said the