“And you are the Druze child, Dilama?” he said gently, and leaning a little back from her, surveyed her intently with dark lustrous eyes.  The girl felt swooning with terror; before his gaze her very flesh seemed dissolving.  It seemed as if her heart, her brain, with the image of Murad stamped on them, would be laid bare to those brilliant, searching eyes.  What would he not know, suspect, find out?  What would he ask? demand of her?  She could not ask herself.  Was this to be the end of his paternal relationship to her? the beginning of a new one?  She dared not lift her eyes lest he should see their terror; the blood burnt in the surface of all her fair skin, as if red-hot irons were pressed to it.  And Ahmed, gazing upon her with the pure noonday light, softened by the leafy screen without pouring over her, drank in her fair Syrian beauty with delight.  The pale, rose-hued silken clothing she wore harmonised with the ivory and rose of her round arms and throat and cheeks, and threw up the masses of dark hair that fell beneath her veil to her slender waist.  Ahmed very gently unbound the snowy garment from her head and stroked her hair lightly, watching the gold gleams in its ripples as his hand passed over them.  He saw her dismay, confusion, even her terror, and noticed the quiver of her hands and the irregular leap of her bosom, but these did not dismay him.  He was accustomed to be beloved even as he loved, and the women of the harem who came to him in fear left him with happy confidence.  He affected now not to see her embarrassment, thinking it to be only that, and said quietly, “And you have been happy, Dilama, in my house?” The girl felt she must speak, though her throat seemed closed and her tongue nerveless.

“Very happy,” she faltered at last in a whisper.

“But you have been lonely, perhaps?” he asked.  “Have the roses and doves in the garden been companions enough for you?  Have you not been too much alone?”

In the heavy load of apprehension of intangible fear and horror that seemed stifling her, a madness of longing came over the girl to be free from her guilty secret, to have never known Murad.  Now she could have looked up fearless, full of expectant joy!  She could have loved this man; she knew it, now that she felt his love approaching her:  hope was dying within her that ever again would he regard her simply as his daughter.  She knew those tones of the voice, she had heard them from Murad in the garden, but here the voice was infinitely more refined, the sound of it exquisitely musical; and now, that love for her was in it, it told her a new secret, that she could have given love for love.  She knew, though her eyelids were down, how beautiful the face was that bent over her:  the straight, severe lines of it, the magnificent eyes and brows burnt through her lids.  Ah, why had he waited so long, or she not waited longer?

Full of intolerable, irrepressible pain, she looked up at last suddenly.