Then out from the crowd a voice made an offer.
The sum staggered the auctioneer. It equalled nearly five hundred pounds of English money. No girl, even the creamy Barbary beauties, had ever fetched that amount.
Wild commotion followed. But the price went up and up, doubling itself in ten minutes.
To escape for a moment from the sea of covetous eyes, Pansy raised her own.
There was someone watching her from a window, someone who looked as tortured as herself—another soul condemned to hell.
It was a moment before she recognised that drawn, haggard face as her fathers; it looked an old man's. He was there, the father she loved, condemned by his enemy to see her sold.
She tried to smile. It was a woeful effort. And when the blur of tears that seeing him brought to her eyes had passed he was gone.
It seemed to Pansy that for an eternity she stood on the edge of the Pit, waiting until one of the devils, more powerful than the rest, should drag her in.
The din died down as the sale proceeded, lost in tense excitement. Of the twenty or more who had started bidding for her, only three were left now. One of them, mad with lust and excitement, had forced his way up to the edge of the dais and was clinging to it with grimy hands—a lean man in turban and loin-cloth only, with long matted hair and beard, who, foaming at the mouth, was cursing his competitors, yet always bidding higher as he stared at Pansy with the glare of a maddened beast.
Pansy tried not to see him, but he was always there, horrible beyond comprehension, the worst of the demons in the hell surrounding her.