* * * * * All at once Aspasia found herself awake—a blast of cold air had rushed into the drowsy secret atmosphere. The door had been flung open and one had entered—a man who came with quick clean tread, whose face was pale, as if indeed risen from the dead, but whose eyes shone with a wonderful light of life. The woman in the bed reared herself up with outflung arms, and, as he who entered went straight to her, she cast herself upon his breast with a great cry. "Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry!" Such a cry had the walls of the manor-house surely never held before. It might have been the voice of all the anguish and all the ecstasies it had known these centuries. It rang round the old walls; every echo took it up and answered it, as if they had been waiting for it. *BOOK III* *CHAPTER I* Bethune had soon packed his simple baggage; then he went straight to bed, setting his will upon sleep, against thought. But what mind perturbed can command repose? Every ugly demon of disquiet that his situation could breed took form and sat beside him on the narrow bed. Three there were of a special torment. One with the eyes of hatred that Lady Gerardine had fixed upon him that evening. A twin demon that for ever repeated in his ear: "You should have died, that he might live." And a third, whose face was veiled, whose immutable hand pointed towards the empty sandy desert of the future. When at last, far on in the watches of the night, sleep did fall upon him, it was in trouble and confusion of mind—a dream-struggle with fate, more painful even than the reality. He was back in the midst of the siege—one of the starving, thirst-plagued, harassed garrison. They were hard pressed, piling sandbags on a newly defiladed rampart, but his men were a leaden weight upon him. He could not stir them to activity; when he tried to shout orders or expostulation, he could bring forth nothing but a whisper. Always the barricades melted away beneath his touch, his very rifle twisted like wax when he handled it, and then there sprang into the breach Muhammed Saif-u-din, one of an endless chain of leaping swordsmen: and Muhammed stood with folded arms smiling at him ironically.