Kara lay back on his down pillows with a sneer on his face and his brain very busy.

What started the train of thought he did not know, but at that moment his mind was very far away.

It carried him back a dozen years to a dirty little peasant's cabin on the hillside outside Durazzo, to the livid face of a young Albanian chief, who had lost at Kara's whim all that life held for a man, to the hateful eyes of the girl's father, who stood with folded arms glaring down at the bound and manacled figure on the floor, to the smoke-stained rafters of this peasant cottage and the dancing shadows on the roof, to that terrible hour of waiting when he sat bound to a post with a candle flickering and spluttering lower and lower to the little heap of gunpowder that would start the trail toward the clumsy infernal machine under his chair.

He remembered the day well because it was Candlemas day, and this was the anniversary.

He remembered other things more pleasant.