was still more certain that they had made away with their own English lord, whether for the sake of the jewels he wore about him, or for the sake of treasures less doubtful than those imputed to Haroun, and of which the hiding-place would be to them much better known. "I did not share that opinion," wrote the narrator, "for I assured myself that Ayesha sincerely loved her awful master; and that love need excite no wonder, for Louis Grayle was one whom if a woman, and especially a woman of the East, had once loved, before old age and infirmity fell on him, she would love and cherish still more devotedly when it became her task to protect the being who, in his day of power and command, had exalted his slave into the rank of his pupil and companion. And the Indian whom Grayle had assigned to her service was allowed to have that brute kind of fidelity which, though it recoils from no crime for a master, refuses all crime against him. "I came to the conclusion that Haroun had been murdered by order of Louis Grayle,--for the sake of the elixir of life,--murdered by Juma the Strangler; and that Grayle himself had been aided in his flight from Aleppo, and tended, through the effects of the life-giving drug thus murderously obtained, by the womanly love of the Arab woman Ayesha. These convictions (since I could not, without being ridiculed as the wildest of dupes, even hint at the vital elixir) I failed to impress on the Eastern officials, or even on a countryman of my own whom I chanced to find at Aleppo. They only arrived at what seemed the common-sense verdict,--namely, that Haroun might have been strangled, or might have died in a fit (the body, little examined, was buried long before I came to Aleppo); and that Louis Grayle was murdered by his own treacherous dependents. But all trace of the fugitives was lost. "And now," wrote Sir Philip, "I will state by what means I discovered that Louis Grayle still lived,--changed from age into youth; a new form, a new being; realizing, I verily believe, the image which Haroun's words had raised up, in what then seemed to me the metaphysics of fantasy,---criminal, without consciousness of crime; the dreadest of the mere animal race; an incarnation of the blind powers of Nature,--beautiful and joyous, wanton and terrible and destroying! Such as ancient myths have personified in the idols of Oriental creeds; such as Nature, of herself, might form man in her moments of favour, if man were wholly the animal, and spirit were no longer the essential distinction between himself and the races to which by superior formation and subtler perceptions he would still be the king.