submissive Eastern salutation, and spoke in his foreign tongue, softly,
humbly, fawningly, to judge by his tone and his gesture.

I moved yet farther away from him with loathing, and now the human thought
flashed upon me: was I, in truth, exposed to no danger in trusting myself
to the mercy of the weird and remorseless master of those hirelings from
the East,--seven men in number, two at least of them formidably armed, and
docile as bloodhounds to the hunter, who has only to show them their
prey? But fear of man like myself is not my weakness; where fear found
its way to my heart, it was through the doubts or the fancies in which man
like myself disappeared in the attributes, dark and unknown, which we give
to a fiend or a spectre. And, perhaps, if I could have paused to analyze
my own sensations, the very presence of this escort-creatures of flesh and
blood-lessened the dread of my incomprehensible tempter. Rather, a
hundred times, front and defy those seven Eastern slaves--I, haughty son
of the Anglo-Saxon who conquers all races because he fears no odds--than
have seen again on the walls of my threshold the luminous, bodiless
Shadow! Besides: Lilian! Lilian! for one chance of saving her life,
however wild and chimerical that chance might be, I would have shrunk not
a foot from the march of an army.

Thus reassured and thus resolved, I advanced, with a smile of disdain, to
meet Margrave and his veiled companion, as they now came from the moonlit
copse.

"Well," I said to him, with an irony that unconsciously mimicked his own,
"have you taken advice with your nurse? I assume that the dark form by
your side is that of Ayesha."

The woman looked at me from her sable veil, with her steadfast solemn