Cavalier” — ”there is the pirate who should call me queen! There” — with a gesture toward Rubens’s great canvas — ”are men that I would command. Here, I must stay, why? Because a dead man willed it so. May I wither eternally if I make not my own laws. Milo!”

She clapped her hands, and in a moment the giant was before her, reverent awe in every line of his huge body.

“Sultana?”

“Are my beasts well fed?”

“They eat like crocodiles, guzzle like swine, Sultana.”

“See that the liquor flows freely, Milo. And a word in thy ear. We shall go from here as quickly as the fates will send a ship. Let no sail pass henceforth.”