Olga spoke with an air of angered innocence which completely deceived the Sultan, anxious as he was to find the extraordinary story false, and he hastily replied—
“It is the latter that I desire, of course. I was obliged to say that if you were unable to deny the accusation it would be impossible for me to continue an alliance with one who had been guilty of a crime which my faith and the customs of my race denounce as vile beyond all human measure. But I refused to believe it against you until your own lips had confessed it, or undeniable evidence had proved it, and therefore I have asked you to come and let us know the truth.”
“I thank you, Sultan Khalid, for your confidence and your chivalry,” she said, looking up into his eyes with a glance that rendered all denial from her once and for ever unnecessary. “You shall hear me deny the foul falsehood to my traducer’s face.”
Stung to fresh fury by the knowledge that Alan had sought to expose her in her true nature to the man whom she sought to make her slave in his place, she strode forward to within three paces of where he was standing, and, drawing herself up to the full height of her royal stature, she faced him with pale cheeks and blazing eyes, her beauty so transfigured by anger that the Moslems standing about her instinctively shrank back, awe-stricken by such an incarnation of wrath and loveliness as no man of them had ever dreamed of before. Even Alan himself forgot his hate and disgust for the moment in the contemplation of her almost miraculous beauty and the indescribable dignity with which her anger invested her, and waited in silence that was almost respectful for the tempest of wrath and reproach which he saw was about to be let loose on him.
Her lips trembled mutely for a moment or two before any sound came from them, but when she spoke her tone was low and clear, though almost hoarse with passion, and shaken by the manifest effort she made to keep it under control.
“So this is the return that your chivalry makes for my generosity in giving you life and liberty when you were lost to the world; when I might have killed you, as I see now that I should have done, without a single soul among your people knowing anything of your fate!
“I expected that you would take up arms against me, for your people and mine are enemies to the death; and I knew, too, that the love which I had spurned would not be long in turning to active hate. But you excelled my expectations—you, one of the Princes of the Air, the scion of a race that holds itself above all the other races of the earth, the son of a man who but a few years ago was lord and master of the world! You come in the guise of open and honourable warfare to smirch with your foul lies the fame of a woman for whose sake you made yourself a traitor to your people and a murderer of your own comrades. A pretty story, forsooth, to tell in the ears of my friends and allies. Do you take them for children or fools that you expect them to believe it?
“Imagine such a miracle, your Majesty,” she continued, turning, with the clear ring of a mocking laugh in her voice, to the Sultan, “imagine this Alan Arnold, son of the President of Aeria, with his friend and lieutenant, Alexis Masarov, and a crew of eight Aerians on board their flagship, armed with the most tremendous means of destruction ever invented by human genius, and each man of them, moreover, possessing in his own person the power of life and death, as he himself has proved before your own eyes.
“These kings among men invite two casual acquaintances for a trip to the clouds, and these two guests, a youth of twenty and a girl not seventeen, unarmed and without assistance, seize their ship, kill eight of their invincibly armed comrades, and lead the captain and his lieutenant away captive. And how? By means of some mysterious drugs, subtle and irresistible poisons, of which such a boy and girl could not possibly have known either the composition or the use, and which they would have been afraid to employ if they had done.