Then, for the first time in her life, she fainted.
With a little laugh of tender triumph, he caught her and lifted her on his horse.
As he turned to go, grimy, covetous hands clutched Pansy's skirts—the hands of the miser feather merchant.
With a savage oath, the Sultan raised his heavy riding whip and felled the defiler.
Then he rode off with Pansy.
But before this happened Sir George Barclay had been taken from the room overlooking the slave market. He did not see the Sultan Casim Ammeh come in person to save the girl. He did not know that, in Pansy's case, at any rate, the auction had been but a pretence.
CHAPTER XIII
When Pansy returned to consciousness she felt she had awakened from some nightmare and was back in her own world, a civilized world; her capture by the Sultan Casim Ammeh and all the subsequent happenings some wild dream, terrifying in its reality as dreams can be.
She was lying on a big bed in a shady room, among sheets and pillows of finest linen; a solid brass bedstead such as might have come from any good shop in London, not among silken cushions and rugs on an ottoman. And there was a bedroom suite of some choice grey wood with a litter of gold toilet appointments on the wide dressing-table.