The last mueddin had ceased his chant, a hum of voices rose through the still air without the house; the city was waking to another day of massacre. And Marguerite was creeping down the stairs. She had not gone to bed that night, after all. She was still wearing her white frock with the embroidery of silver. She had thrown over her shoulders a glistening cloak. She had put on the jewels he had given her. They sparkled in the dim light on her bosom—a square sapphire hung on a chain of platinum and diamonds which went about her neck—on her wrists, on her shoes, at her waist.
“Why? Why?” he asked of himself; and as Marguerite reached the foot of the stairs and stepped into the court, he had the answer to his question. For something gleamed in her hand—the great key of the street door.
Paul Ravenel was just in time. For with the swiftness and the silence of the ghost he had almost taken her to be, Marguerite flashed across the patio, and was gone.
“Marguerite!” he cried aloud, as he sprang to his feet, so that the house rang with his cry. A sob, a wail of despair answered him, a clink as the heavy key dropped from her startled hands. He found her blindly fumbling at the bolts, distraught with her need of haste.
He lifted her in his arms as one lifts a child and carried her back into the court.
“Marguerite!” he whispered. “A step outside that tunnel dressed as you are, now that Fez is awake, and—”
“I know, I know,” she interrupted him. “I should be out of your way altogether. Oh, Paul, let me go! I have been thinking of it all night. I can’t take, all the time, and everything you have that’s dear to you! Let me give too—something in return—my life, my dear, that’s worth so little. Oh, Paul, let me give it now, when I am ready to give it—before my courage goes,” and she struggled and beat upon his breast with her small fists in a frenzy.
But he held her close to him. “Poor child, what a night of horror she must have lived through,” he reflected. Lying on her bed in the dark, waiting for the first gleam of dawn, for the first sounds of the city’s awakening, and shutting her eyes and her ears against the terror of these savage and wild-eyed fanatics, forbidding her heart to sink before the ordeal of her great sacrifice. She had decked herself out in her jewels, like that bride of whom she had told him, but for a different reason; that she might the sooner attract notice and invite murder.