pretext if I can help it,--for I don't want to kill you, and I am
convinced your death and not mine would be the result of a fight
between us!"

His eyes flashed under his straight, fierce brows with a sudden
touch of imperiousness, and his commanding presence became
magnetic, almost over-powering. Tormented with a dozen cross-
currents of feeling, young Denzil Murray was mute;--only his
breath came and went quickly, and there was a certain silently-
declared antagonism in his very attitude. Gervase saw it and
smiled; then turning away with his peculiarly noiseless step and
grace of bearing, he disappeared.




CHAPTER V.


Ten minutes later the larger number of dancers in the ball-room
came to a sudden pause in their gyrations and stood looking on in
open-mouthed, reluctantly-admiring wonderment at the exquisite
waltz movements of the Princess Ziska as she floated past them in
the arms of Gervase, who, as a "Bedouin chief," was perhaps only
acting his part aright when he held her to him with so passionate
and close a grip and gazed down upon her fair face with such a
burning ardor in his eyes. Nothing in the dancing world was ever
seen like the dancing of these two--nothing so languorously
beautiful as the swaying grace of their well-matched figures
gliding to the music in as perfectly harmonious a measure as a