“The caravan does not start for two weeks more,” he answered thoughtfully.  “We must wait for it.  It would be madness to try to escape alone.  We should be seen, noted, and tracked down.  Think how Ahmed will look for his treasure when he finds it stolen!  But if you are hidden in a bale of goods on a camel in the caravan, who will suspect, who will know that the Druze has taken you?  The whole caravan of Druzes cannot be stopped because Ahmed has lost a wife!  No, in the caravan, with all the rest, we are safe.  There is no other way.”

There was silence while the twilight deepened in the garden, and the stars began to show above like flashing swords in the sky.  In the languor of love that knows no fear and has no cares, that opiate of the soul, Dilama lay in his arms and sought his lips and eyes, and asked no more about caravans and journeys and mountains, drugged and heavy with love.  In an hour when all was velvet blackness beneath the wall, they kissed farewell.  He scaled the crumbling bricks, and regained the sheltering orange grove, and she walked slowly back, drawing smooth her filmy veil, towards the darkened palace.

Five days later at noontime, as Dilama was sitting in the garden playing with the tame white doves by the fountain, one of the black female slaves approached her.  Dilama looked up questioningly, holding a dove to her bosom.

“The lord is sorrowing within for his dead wife and dead son.  He has sent for you; go in, and lead him away from grief,” and the woman smiled and prostrated herself before Dilama, who shrank instinctively away like a frightened child.  But there is only one law and one will in the harem, and she rose obediently, letting the dove go, and stood ready to follow the slave.  That meaning smile on the woman’s face filled her with an intuitive, instinctive, undefined fear, and at the same instant there rushed over her the realisation of the great happiness that same smile would have brought her had there been no Murad, had she fled from that rose-filled corner on that first evening—­had she, in a word, waited!  This summons to the presence of their lord is what so many of the harem slaves pine and long for through weary months, and sometimes years.  It came now to her, and it meant nothing but vague fear and dread.  She followed the slave with unelastic steps, and her brain full of heavy thoughts; they passed the women’s apartments and went on to the Selamlik and to the room of Ahmed, that looked out with unscreened windows into the cool, deep green of the garden.  The slave drew back at the door, holding a curtain aside for the girl to enter.  She went forward, the curtain fell behind her, and she was alone with Ahmed.

He was sitting opposite on a low divan or couch, clothed from head to foot in a deep blue robe, and with a turban of the same colour twisted above his level brows—­a kingly, majestic figure, and the girl’s heart beat and her eyelids fell as she crept slowly over the floor towards him.  At his feet she sank to her knees, and would have put her forehead to the ground, but Ahmed bent forward, and clasping both her arms lifted her on to the couch beside him.