El-Islam, life to the true Arabian, was, by degrees, deserting the captive. How should he maintain a religion that taught moderation in all things, duty to the master, forbearance from intoxication? Ahalya, whose mother, in her long captivity, had lost her own beautiful Magian religion, and who had herself been brought up a Hindoo, had, like many Indian women of station, taken the god Krishna, lord of beauty, romance, and love, for her special deity. And some of the pretty ceremony and graceful superstition of her half-doubtful beliefs had woven themselves like an evil web around Fidá’s brain. Often, during their quiet hours, Ahalya used to sing to her lover parts of the great Indian Song of Songs—the wooing of Krishna and Radha. And her voice, and the smooth-flowing poetry of the words, charmed him into new forgetfulness of the sterner western creed. The story was well fitted to their state. As Ahalya sang, he loved to call her Radha; and if she delighted in him as the incarnation of her too well worshipped god, her lover saw in it no sacrilege. But in this way his prayers grew strange to him; and he became in some sort a pagan, unworthy of any god. There was but one pursuit left in which they found an honest pleasure. Both of them loved the boy, Bhavani, whom, in different ways, each was instructing in a primitive code of manhood and chivalry. The child had taken so strong a fancy to Fidá that his father, perfectly confident of the Asra’s fitness for the position, began more and more to surrender him as cup-bearer in order that he might attend his son. And Fidá, finding the child truthful, obedient, and affectionate, took a genuine pride in instructing him in all that he knew. There were times, indeed, when the man, brought into close contact with young innocence and instinctive honor, was drawn to a certain unavoidable sense of guilt; and this same thing Ahalya felt, when, in accordance with the young prince’s wishes, she rehearsed with him, in their old way, the dramatic epics of ancient Indian heroism and self-sacrifice. And so much alike had the minds of the lovers become, that the young Bhavani, imbibing from each the same often identically expressed principles, came by degrees to connect the two in his mind; perhaps even, with a child’s intuition, guessing something of their position, though unconscious of its sin.