The boy shuddered slightly; he opened his lips as though to speak, but the girl broke out impetuously:
"I alone am in fault," she cried. "It was I who would not listen to my brother when he said, 'we shall perish by the way if we go forth into the wilderness.' It is true," she continued, turning to the lad, "folly dwelleth in the heart of a woman. I am minded to let thee beat me. I have deserved it."
Abu Ben Hesed smiled in the midst of his great beard, but the smile looked also out of his eyes, so that the lad was emboldened to speak.
"We fled before the face of an enemy," he said, looking squarely into the bright eyes of the man before him. "He would have made slaves of us in the city; death in the wilderness is better."
"Thou hast spoken a word of wisdom when thou hast so said, my son," cried Ben Hesed, his eyes flashing. "And who is it that would have caged the wild eaglets of the desert?"
"I know not," replied the lad. "I saw not the man, I only heard him speak. We were hidden in the abiding place of the dead; he would have shut us up there to perish, but Sechet smote him in the act and we left him on his face in the sand."
"Thou art Egyptian," said Ben Hesed after a pause. "How comes it that thou canst speak the tongue of the desert?"
"It was my mother's language; my father was a Greek."
"Where then are thy parents?"
"Dead, many years dead," said the boy looking down, and digging his bare toes into the hot sand. A single tear rolled swiftly down his brown cheek.