‘What does all this mean?’ asked the captain, looking up as he finished reading. ‘And to-morrow,’ said I, ‘I think another message would have gone to Rhodes--’ ‘I had orders to be ready to go myself to-morrow.’ ‘You had?’ I cried. ‘And what would you have carried?’ ‘That I don’t know.’ ‘Aye, but I do. There’s your cargo!’ And I flung down what I had written. He read it once and again, and looked across the table at me, fingering the slip of paper. ‘He did not write this?’ he said. ‘As you saw, I wrote it. If he had lived, then, as surely as I live, he would have written it. Captain, it was for me that dagger was meant. Else why did he take the man Demetri with him? Had Demetri cause to love him, or he cause to trust Demetri?’ The captain stood holding the paper. I walked round the table and laid my hand on his shoulder. ‘You didn’t know his schemes,’ said I. ‘They weren’t schemes that he could tell to a Turkish gentleman.’ At this instant the door opened and the officer who had been with us in the morning entered. ‘I have laid his Excellency’s body in his cabin,’ he said. ‘Come,’ said the captain, ‘we will go and see it, my lord.’ I followed him to where Mouraki lay. The Pasha’s face was composed and there was even the shadow of a smile on his pale lips. ‘Do you believe what I tell you?’ I asked. ‘I tried to save the girl from him and in return he meant to kill me. Do you believe me? If not, hang me for his murder; if you do, why am I a prisoner? What have I done? Where is my offence?’ The captain looked down on Mouraki’s face, tugged his beard, smiled, was silent an instant. Then he shrugged his shoulders, and he said--he who had not dared, a day before, to lift his voice or raise his finger unbidden in Mouraki’s presence: ‘Faugh, the Armenian dog!’ There was, I fear, race prejudice in that exclamation, but I did not contradict it. I stood looking down on Mouraki’s face, and to my fancy, stirred by the events of the past hours and twisted from sobriety to strange excesses of delusion, the lips seemed once again to curl in their old bitter smile, as he lay still and heard himself spurned, and could not move to exact the vengeance which in his life he had never missed. So we left him--the Armenian dog! CHAPTER XX A PUBLIC PROMISE