To die thus, to die for her under her eyes, leaving to her widowed
life a living token of our love--what more could Allah grant, what
better could a lover and a soldier desire? There was no honour, and
little to satisfy even the passion of vengeance, in the sword-strokes
that clove one enemy from the shoulder to the waist, smote half
through the neck of a second, and laid two or three more dead or dying
at my feet. If the weight of the sword were lighter here than on
Earth, the arm that wielded it had been trained in very different
warfare, and possessed a strength which made the combat so unequal
that, had no other life hung on my blows, I should have been ashamed
to strike. As I paused for a moment under this feeling, I noted that,
outside the space half cleared by slaughter and by terror, the bearers
of the lightning gun were forming a sort of semicircle, embarrassed by
the comrades driven back upon them, but drawing momentarily nearer,
and seeking to enclose before firing the object of their aim. They
would have shattered my heart and head in another instant but
that--springing on the projecting stone of which I have spoken, which
raised her to my level--Eveena had flung her arms around me, and
sheltered my person with her own.
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