He saw the flame in Aziza's eyes. He saw the stiffening of her defiance, of half-incredulous affront. Then, her form drawn up, her bared arms outflung, her vivid, painted, furious face challenging him. "I am not beautiful--like Aimée?" she said in a voice of venom, and in the English, for double measure, "You not like me--no?" "You _are_ beautiful and I _do_ like you," Ryder combated, feeling a bungling fool. And then went on to thrust into that half-second of suspended fury, a faint breath of appeasing. "But--don't you see--it's my duty--" "You go--?" she said clearly. Even in that moment he had a sharp prescience of the unwisdom of his rejection. A cold calculator of chance and probabilities would have reckoned that a half hour of assuagement here would have been a wiser investment of his mortal moments than any virtuous plunge into single-hearted duty. But Ryder did not calculate. He could not, with Aimée under that beast's hand. His heart and soul were possessed with her danger and his heart and soul carried his body instinctively back from the dancing girl's advance, and he whispered, "I must go. There is no time--" She flung back her fiery-hued head with a gesture of intolerable rage. Her eyes were lightnings. "Dog of a Christian!" she said chokingly and flew to the doors. Back she thrust the heavy hangings, turning a quick key in the lock and wrenching the door wide. And before Ryder could understand, before he could bring himself to realize that she was not simply violently expelling him from her room, she gave a shriek that rang wildly down the long-unseen corridors. At the top of her lungs, with one hand out to thrust him back or cling to him if he attempted to pass, she shrieked again and again. Instantly there came a running of feet. CHAPTER XIX AN INTERRUPTION When Hamdi Bey had taken Aimée back to her apartments he pulled sharply upon a bellcord. In a few moments the slave woman, Fatima, made her appearance, no kindly-eyed old crone like Miriam, but a sallow, furtive-faced creature, with an old disfiguring scar across a cheek. The general pointed to the wet and fainting girl huddling weakly upon the divan. "Your new mistress has met with an accident, out boating--a curse upon me for gratifying forbidden caprice!" he said crisply. "Be silent of this and array her quickly in garments of rest. I will return." Very hurriedly he took himself and his own wet condition away. He was furious, through and through. What a night--what a wedding night! Scandal and frustration... a bride with a desperate lover... a bride who, herself, drew revolvers and threatened. It was beyond any old tale of the palace. For less, girls had had his father's dagger driven through their hearts--his grandfather, at a mere whisper from a eunuch, had given his favorite to the lion. The whisper was found incorrect at a later--too late--date, and the eunuch had furnished the lion another meal.