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“I am a wicked person,” added Abdallah Jack, with a profound conviction. “That is why Monsieur Greyne chose me as his guide.”

The novelist began to quake. Her chocolate brocade fluttered. Was she herself to learn at first hand, and on her first evening in Africa, enough about African frailty to last her for the rest of her life? And how much more of life would remain to her after her stock of knowledge had been thus increased? The carriage turned into a second side street, narrower and darker than the last.

“Are we going right?” she said apprehensively.

“No, madame; we are going wrong–we are going to the wicked part of the city.”

“But–but–you are sure Mr. Greyne will be there?”

Abdallah Jack laughed sardonically.

“Monsieur Greyne is never anywhere else. Monsieur Greyne is wicked as is a mad Touareg of the desert.”

“I don’t think you quite understand my husband,” said Mrs. Greyne, feeling in duty bound to stand up for her poor, maligned Eustace. “Whatever he may have done he has done at my special request.”

“Madame says?”

“I say that in all his proceedings while in Algiers Mr. Greyne has been acting under my directions.”

Abdallah Jack fixed his enormous eyes steadily upon her.

“You are his wife, and told him to come here, and to do as he has done?”

“Ye-yes,” faltered Mrs. Greyne, for the first time in her life feeling as if she were being escorted towards the criminal dock by a jailer with Puritan tendencies.

“Then it is true what they say on the shores of the great canal,” he remarked composedly.

“What do they say?” inquired Mrs. Greyne.

“That England is a land of female devils,” returned the guide as the carriage plunged into a filthy alley, between two rows of blind houses, and began to ascend a steep hill.

Mrs. Greyne gasped. She opened her lips to protest vigorously, but her head swam–either from indignation or from fatigue–and she could not utter a word. The horses mounted like cats upward into the dense blackness, from which dropped down the faint sounds of squealing music and of hoarse cries and laughter. The wheels bounded over the stones, sank into the deep ruts, scraped against the sides of the unlighted houses. And Abdallah Jack sat staring at Mrs. Greyne as an English clergyman’s wife might stare at the appalling rites of some deadly cannibal encountered in a far-off land, with a stony wonder, a sort of paralysed curiosity.

Suddenly the carriage stopped on a piece of waste land covered with small pebbles. Abdallah Jack sprang out.

“Why do we stop?” said Mrs. Greyne, turning as pale as ashes.

“The carriage can go no farther. Madame must walk.”

Mrs. Greyne began to tremble.

“We are to leave the coachman?”

“I shall escort madame, alone.”

The great novelist’s tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She felt like a Merrin’s exercise-book, every leaf of which was covered with African frailty. However, there was no help for it. She had to descend, and stand among the pebbles.

“Where are we going?”

Abdallah Jack waved his hand towards a stone rampart dimly seen in the faint light that emanated from the starry sky.

“Down there into the alley of the Dead Dervishes.”

Mrs. Greyne could not repress a cry of horror. At that moment she would have given a thousand pounds to have Mrs. Forbes at her side.

Abdallah Jack grasped her by the hand, and led her ruthlessly forward. Gazing with terror-stricken eyes over the crumbling rampart of the Kasbah, she saw the city far below her, the lights of the streets, the lights of the ships in harbour. She heard the music of a bugle, and wished she were a Zouave safe in barracks. She wished she were a German-Swiss porter, a merry chasseur–anything but Mrs. Eustace Greyne. One thing alone supported her in this hour of trial, the thought of her husband’s ecstasy when she appeared upon the dread scene of his awful labours, to tell him that he was released, that he need visit them no more.