was believed by them to belong to that murderous sect of fanatics whose
existence as a community has only recently been made known to Europe, and
who strangle their unsuspecting victim in the firm belief that they
thereby propitiate the favour of the goddess they serve. The current
opinion at Aleppo was, that if those two persons had conspired to murder
Haroun, perhaps for the sake of the treasures he was said to possess, it
was still more certain that they had made away with their own English
lord, whether for the sake of the jewels he wore about him, or for the
sake of treasures less doubtful than those imputed to Haroun, and of which
the hiding-place would be to them much better known.

"I did not share that opinion," wrote the narrator, "for I assured
myself that Ayesha sincerely loved her awful master; and that love
need excite no wonder, for Louis Grayle was one whom if a woman, and
especially a woman of the East, had once loved, before old age and
infirmity fell on him, she would love and cherish still more devotedly
when it became her task to protect the being who, in his day of power
and command, had exalted his slave into the rank of his pupil and
companion. And the Indian whom Grayle had assigned to her service was
allowed to have that brute kind of fidelity which, though it recoils
from no crime for a master, refuses all crime against him.

"I came to the conclusion that Haroun had been murdered by order
of Louis Grayle,--for the sake of the elixir of life,--murdered by
Juma the Strangler; and that Grayle himself had been aided in his
flight from Aleppo, and tended, through the effects of the
life-giving drug thus murderously obtained, by the womanly love of the
Arab woman Ayesha. These convictions (since I could not, without
being ridiculed as the wildest of dupes, even hint at the vital
elixir) I failed to impress on the Eastern officials, or even on a