“Dear child,” he said with a brusque laugh, “it’s a wilderness and we carry what we need on our backs. Selden meets us at a place called Glenwild, on the edge of this wilderness, and we follow him in on our two legs.” He glanced across at the mantel clock. “If you’ll dress,” he said nervously, “we’ll go to some shop that outfits sportsmen for the North. Because, if we can, we ought to leave on the one o’clock train.” She smiled; came up to him. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Because I also am nervous and tired; and I mean to make an end of every Yezidee remaining in America.” “Sanang, too?” They both flushed deeply. She said in a steady voice: “Between God and Erlik there is a black gulf where a million million stars hang, lighting a million million other worlds. “Prince Sanang’s star glimmers there. It is a sun, called Yramid. And it lights the planet, Yu-tsung. Let him reign there between God and Erlik.” “You will slay this man?” “God forbid!” she said, shuddering. “But I shall send him to his own star. Let my soul be ransom for his! And may Allah judge between us—between this man and me.” Then, in the still, sunny room, the girl turned to face the East. And her husband saw her lips move as though speaking, but heard no sound. “What on earth are you saying there, all to yourself?” he demanded at last. She turned her head and looked at him across her left shoulder. “I asked Sansa to help me.... And she says she will.” Cleves nodded in a dazed way. Then he opened a window and leaned there in the sunshine, looking down into Madison Avenue. And the roar of traffic seemed to soothe his nerves. But “Good heavens!” he thought; “do such things really go on in New York in 1920! Is the entire world becoming a little crazy? Am I really in my right mind when I believe that the girl I married is talking, without wireless, to another girl in China!” He leaned there heavily, gazing down into the street with sombre eyes. “What a ghastly thing these Yezidees are trying to do to the world—these Assassins of men’s minds’!” he thought, turning away toward the door of his bedroom. As he crossed the threshold he stumbled, and looking down saw that he had tripped over a white sheet lying there. For a moment he thought it was a sheet from his own bed, and he started to pick it up. Then he saw the naked blade of a knife at his feet. With an uncontrollable shudder he stepped out of the shroud and stood staring at the knife as though it were a snake. It had a curved blade and a bone hilt coarsely inlaid with Arabic characters in brass. The shroud was a threadbare affair—perhaps a bed-sheet from some cheap lodging house. But its significance was so repulsive that he hesitated to touch it. However, he was ashamed to have it discovered in his room. He picked up the brutal-looking knife and kicked the shroud out into the corridor, where they could guess if they liked how such a rag got into the Ritz-Carlton.