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“She shall choose her own death,” said the Sheikhel-beled; “and I will bear word to the Mudir.”

“I dine with the Mudir to-night; I will carry the word,” said Dicky; “and the death that the woman shall die will be the death he will choose.”

The woman’s eyes came like lightning from the distance, and fastened upon his face. Then he said, with the back of his hand to his mouth to hide a yawn:

“The manner of her death will please the Mudir. It must please him.”

“What death does this vulture among women choose to die?” said the Sheikh-el-beled.

Her answer could scarcely be heard in the roar and the riot surrounding the hut.

A half-hour later Dicky entered the room where the Mudir sat on his divan drinking his coffee. The great man looked up in angry astonishment–for Dicky had come unannounced-and his fat hands twitched on his breast, where they had been folded. His sallow face turned a little green. Dicky made no salutation.

“Dog of an infidel!” said the Mudir under his breath.

Dicky heard, but did no more than fasten his eyes upon the Mudir for a moment.

“Your business?” asked the Mudir.

“The business of the Khedive,” answered Dicky, and his riding-whip tapped his leggings. “I have come about the English girl.” As he said this, he lighted a cigarette slowly, looking, as it were casually, into the Mudir’s eyes.

The Mudir’s hand ran out like a snake towards a bell on the cushions, but Dicky shot forward and caught the wrist in his slim, steel-like fingers. There was a hard glitter in his eyes as he looked down into the eyes of the master of a hundred slaves, the ruler of a province.

“I have a command of the Khedive to bring you to Cairo, and to kill you if you resist,” said Dicky. “Sit still–you had better sit still,” he added, in a soothing voice behind which was a deadly authority.

The Mudir licked his dry, colourless lips, and gasped, for he might make an outcry, but he saw that Dicky would be quicker. He had been too long enervated by indulgence to make a fight.

“You’d better take a drink of water,” said Dicky, seating himself upon a Louis Quinze chair, a relic of civilisation brought by the Mudir from Paris into an antique barbarism. Then he added sternly: “What have you done with the English girl?”

“I know nothing of an English girl,” answered the Mudir.

Dicky’s words were chosen as a jeweller chooses stones for the ring of a betrothed woman. “You had a friend in London, a brother of hell like yourself. He, like you, had lived in Paris; and that is why this thing happened. You had your own women slaves from Kordofan, from Circassia, from Syria, from your own land. It was not enough: you must have an English girl in your harem. You knew you could not buy her, you knew that none would come to you for love, neither the drab nor the lady. None would lay her hand in that of a leprous dog like yourself. So you lied, your friend lied for you–sons of dogs of liars all of you, beasts begotten of beasts! You must have a governess for your children, forsooth! And the girl was told she would come to a palace. She came to a stable, and to shame and murder.”

Dicky paused.

The fat, greasy hands of the Mudir fumbled towards the water-glass. It was empty, but he raised it to his lips and drained the air.

Dicky’s eyes fastened him like arrows. “The girl died an hour ago,” he continued. “I was with her when she died. You must pay the price, Abbas Bey.” He paused.

There was a moment’s silence, and then a voice, dry like that of one who comes out of chloroform, said: “What is the price?”

The little touch of cruelty in Dicky’s nature, working with a sense of justice and an ever-ingenious mind, gave a pleasant quietness to the inveterate hate that possessed him. He thought of another woman–of her who was to die to-morrow.