"Oh, Sidi!" he cried, "it rejoices my heart to read the light of understanding in your eyes." Aylmer blinked again bewilderedly. "Where am I and what do you here?" he asked. "You are in Villa Eulalia, Sidi, and where should I be but in attendance on my lord?" Astonishment lifted Aylmer into a weak attempt to rise. The Moor put a hand upon his shoulder and firmly pressed him back. "Nay, Sidi," he said respectfully. "The German doctor lord expressly forbade that you should raise your head from the pillow till he had seen you again." Aylmer began to feel as if his wits as well as his body had been bludgeoned. Circumstances seemed to have leaped freakishly beyond his recollection. "I was brought here when?" he asked. "Yesterday, Sidi. Your brain was sorely smitten inside your skull, or so I understood the man of medicines. For fifteen hours you have lain as one feigning death, though breathing. Now you have come into the right of your senses again. This the medicine man also prophesied." The puzzled frown stayed on Aylmer's brow. "And you?" he demanded. "And you?" The Moor answered with a demure shrug of the shoulder. "Your wounded brain has perchance forgotten, Sidi, that I entered your benign service on the morning of the day which saw you defeated by the treachery of that one whom we sought, you and I. My service has been constant ever since." He met his victim's increasing frown with complacent assurance as he spoke. Surely everything, he seemed to imply, was in order. And as the situation became clear to Aylmer's growing intelligence, the frown became an exasperated smile. "You have used my helplessness to impose yourself into this house as my body-servant," said Aylmer. "Oh, Daoud, you are of a deceitfulness beyond my unpractised powers of speech." "Speech beyond the mere limits of necessity was strongly discountenanced by the German doctor lord," said Daoud, hastily. "Has the Sidi any further desires?" "None, save for information. Speak thou! Give me the plain tale of all happenings since I fell into that trap upon the road. The man we sought--did he escape?" The Moor nodded. "He escaped victoriously, with all his following. He took also the child, the Sidi Jan, who, so they tell me, is the son of his house. They took themselves unmolested into the tangle of the broom, leaving of our company one dead--from the kick of a horse, Sidi--half a dozen senseless, yourself among them, Absalaam grievously wounded in the bosom, though like to recover, and all, save four or five, with bruises, broken limbs, or, at least, frayed and bleeding skin. So they fled, but Ali, of the Walad Said, who had been flung away from the hardness of the open track into the heart of the thicket, had taken no harm and followed them to the caves." Aylmer gave a start. "The caves?" he muttered weakly. "The caves?"