Murad began to seem like a robber depriving her of all these things.  There is no fidelity in the body.  Fidelity is a thing of the mind, always at war with and striving to coerce those instincts of the senses that are ever clamouring after the new and the unknown.  Nature is ever driving us on to seek new mates.  The mind with its trammels of affection, gratitude, pity, consideration, is ever dragging us back and seeking to tie us to the old.  Nature’s rule is fresh seasons, fresh mates, new hours, new loves.  And he who seeks fidelity must woo the mind, for the body cannot give it, and knows not its laws.

After a minute’s silence Ahmed stretched out his hand to her and raised her to her feet.  His face had lost its smiles and fire; it was grave and sombre-looking now, but his voice was gentle as he answered her: 

“You are free to return to the haremlik,” he said; “no one has any power to coerce you.  I wish you to come and go as you will.”  He waved his hand towards the curtain with a gesture of dismissal, and then turned away and rang a little silver bell on a table.  The black slave appeared—­it seemed almost instantly—­before the curtain; while Dilama still stood, motionless, irresolute, with a curious sense of disappointment, mingling with relief, stealing over her.  Ahmed beckoned the slave to him, and said something in a low voice Dilama did not catch, but the last sentence she overheard.  “Send Soutouma to me,” and without taking any further notice of Dilama, Ahmed turned back towards the divan, threw himself upon it, and drew the pipe-stand towards him.

The black slave, with a smile on her curving lips, motioned to Dilama to precede her, and Dilama, with one look flung backward to Ahmed’s couch in the full sunlight of the window, passed under the heavy blue curtain out into the passage.  “Send Soutouma to me!” the words went through her with a cutting feeling, as a knife dividing her flesh.

Soutouma was next to Buldoula in age and rank—­a fair beauty of the harem, with soft, long, sunlit tresses, and a skin of snow.

“Yes, why not? why not?” asked Dilama wildly to herself as her feet dragged along down the passage side by side with the grinning black’s.  “I am a Druze girl:  I belong to Murad and to the mountains.”  But the insidious charm of Ahmed’s personality worked on all the pulses of her body; pulses that know not fidelity, though her brain kept telling her that Murad would be waiting for her in the garden.  But that night Murad did not come.  The garden stood cool and fragrant, full of perfume and rosy light, full of the music of birds and the tints of a thousand flowers—­all the invitations to love, but love itself was absent.  Dilama searched the garden from end to end, and walked in and out among the roses by the buttressed wall, but the garden was empty and silent.  She was alone.  Tired at last, and ready to cry with fatigue and disappointment, she sat down by the red brick wall, leaning her chin on her hand and gazing up towards the windows of the Selamlik, which could only be seen in portions here and there through a leafy screen of plane-tree branches.  How still it was in the garden, and how the scent of the orange flower weighed on the senses!  How clear the pink, transparent air!