The general pointed to the wet and fainting girl huddling weakly upon the divan.

“Your new mistress has met with an accident, out boating—­a curse upon me for gratifying forbidden caprice!” he said crisply.  “Be silent of this and array her quickly in garments of rest.  I will return.”

Very hurriedly he took himself and his own wet condition away.  He was furious, through and through.  What a night—­what a wedding night!  Scandal and frustration... a bride with a desperate lover... a bride who, herself, drew revolvers and threatened.

It was beyond any old tale of the palace.  For less, girls had had his father’s dagger driven through their hearts—­his grandfather, at a mere whisper from a eunuch, had given his favorite to the lion.  The whisper was found incorrect at a later—­too late—­date, and the eunuch had furnished the lion another meal.

His modern leniency in this case would have outraged his ancestors.

But it was not in the bey’s nature to deal the finishing stroke to anything so soft and lovely as Aimee.  He had no intention of depriving himself of her.  If she were red with guilt he would feign belief in her, to save his face until his infatuation was gratified.

But actually he did not believe in any great guilt of hers.  Tewfick Pasha, for all his indulgent modernity, would keep too strict a harem for that.  What he rather believed had happened was that the young American—­now so happily immured in his masonry—­had become aware of the girl through the story of her French father, and in that connection had struck up the clandestine and romantic correspondence which had led to their mutual infatuation and his desperate venture there that afternoon.

The young man had been dealt with—­and the thought of the very summary and competent way he had been dealt with drew the fangs from the bite of that night’s invasion.

His fury felt soothingly glutted.

He had been a match for them both.  He recalled his own subtlety and agility with a genuine smile as he exchanged his dripping uniform for more informal trousers and a house coat.  He had taught that young man a lesson—­a final and ultimate lesson.  And he was beginning to teach one to that girl.  Before he was done with her ...

He felt for her a mingled passion for her beauty and a lust for conquest of her resistant spirit that fed every base and cruel instinct of his nature.

A find—­a rare find—­even with her circumvented lover!  He would have his sport with her....  But though he promised this to himself with feline relish, apprehension and chagrin were still working.

The fond fatuity with which he had welcomed that starry-eyed little creature had been rudely overthrown.  And his pride smarted at the idea of the whispers that might echo and re-echo through his palace.  He was too wise an old hand to flatter himself that it would preserve its bland and silent unawareness of this night.