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As the men approached the central door of the pirates' house, a ed Biamite woman appeared and rudely ordered them to leave the island Tabus eak, and refused to see visitors But she was mistaken; for when Bias, in the dialect of his tribe, shouted loudly that randson Hanno had arrived, there was a asped with difficulty, expressed the old daers

On a sheep's-wool couch, over which was spread a wolfskin, the last gift of her son Satabus, lay the sorceress, who raised herself as Her, she pointed to her deaf ear and begged hiazed into his eyes with a keen, penetrating glance, and interrupted him by the question: "The Greek sculptor whose studio was burned over his head? And blind? Blind still?"

"In both eyes," Bias answered for his master

"And you, fellow?" the old da herself, stopped the reply on the servant's lips with the hasty remark: "You are the blackbeard's slave--a Biamite? Oh, I re house"

Then she gazed intently and thoughtfully fro to Bias, muttered in a whisper: "You alone come from Hanno and Ledscha, and ith them on the Hydra? Very well What news have you for the old woan to relate what brought hierly until he said that Ledscha lived unhappily with her husband, and therefore had left him She sent back to her, as the head of Hanno's faht her froled into a little more erect posture, and asked: "What does this old, not silver talents? And she sends the money to me? To me? And she ran away from her husband? But no--no! Once e--and loudly This ear is the better one"

Bias obeyed, and the old da her brown right hand, covered with a network of blue-black veins, she clinched it into a fist, which she shook far more violently than Bias would have believed possible in her weak condition At the saether that her toothless mouth deepened into a hole, and her diht For so sounds escaped her heaving breast