Through that same lucid air, under the spreading plane-trees, and through the great dim bazaars of the city, walked Murad that evening with quick, hot feet, and the liquid coursing in his veins seemed fire instead of blood.  He went from Druze to Druze, wherever he could find them, in their own homes, or sitting at a shady corner of a street, where the tiny rush-bottomed stools are gathered round the tea-stalls with their hissing brazen urns and porcelain cups, or lounging in the bazaars, or at the marble drinking-fountains.  Wherever they were he found them, and spoke a few hot, eager words to them, urging them to hurry forward their preparations, and be ready to start with the caravan at the rising of the full moon.  Then, as the rosy light changed into violet dusk, he went home to his low, yellow, square-roofed dwelling on the edge of the desert, and sat there in his one unlighted room—­sat there gazing out with unseeing eyes into the lustrous Damascus night beyond the open door, and with the fingers of his right hand playing absently with the handle of his knife.

A week had passed over and Ahmed had not sent again for Dilama, nor had Murad visited the garden, and to the Eastern girl it seemed as if the world had stopped still.  The hot, languid days, the gorgeous nights with the blaze of the stars and the rapture of the nightingales, filled her with madness that seemed insupportable.  She knew of no reason for Murad’s desertion.  She could find out nothing.  She did not dare to breathe a word to any one of the anxiety, the wonder, the desperation that seemed choking her.  What had become of him?  What had happened?  Would he ever come again?  And as he appealed only to her senses, and he was not there, she ceased to wish for him very much, but thought more of Ahmed and the Selamlik that were close to her.  For the mind and the imagination love in absence and long after the absent one, but the senses are stirred by proximity, and turn to the one who is nearest.

One evening, when the soft sky was a clear crimson and the full moon rose a perfect disk of transparent silver, faint as yet in the blood-red glow, Dilama felt as if she could exist no longer in the still, even, unchanging peace of the women’s apartments.  The song of the water without, the coo of the doves, the incessantly repeated love-note of the mating sparrows, seemed to madden her beyond endurance.

She lay face downwards on the soft carpet of her little sleeping-chamber, and moaned unconsciously aloud, “Let me die! let me die!  I have lost favour with all men.”

The black slave was sitting cross-legged just outside the curtain, and when these slow, long drawn-out words came from the other side a light gleamed in her shrewd, beady-black eyes.  With one claw-like hand she cautiously drew back a fold of the curtain, and peering in saw the foremost lady of the harem lying prostrate, her face pressed to the floor.  She made no sound, but dropping the curtain noiselessly, sidled slowly off down the dark passage leading to the Selamlik.  Ahmed was alone in his apartment when the slave appeared, sitting on the broad window ledge gazing out from the window which overlooked his grounds, and beyond them the white minarets and shining cupolas of the city.  He turned at the interruption, but his face lighted up with pleasure as he recognised the women’s attendant, and he signed to her to approach.