She fitted it into the ancient lock and turned it; carefully she pressed open the gate and stared anxiously into the gloom of the shadowy garden that it disclosed.

Relief colored her voice as she turned to him.

“All is quiet....  I am safe, now....  And so—­good-bye, monsieur.”

“And this is where you live?” Ryder whispered.

“There—­in that wing,” she murmured, slipping within the gate, and he stole after her, and looked across the garden, through a fringe of date palms, to the outlines of the buildings.

Dim and dark showed the high walls, black as a prison, only here and there the pale orange oblong of a lighted window.

“Did you climb out the window?” he murmured.

From beneath the veil came a little sound of soft derision.

“But there are always bars, even in the garden windows of the haremlik!...  No, I stole down by an old stair....  That wing, there, on the right.”

Barred on the garden, and on the street the impregnable wooden screens of the mashrubiyeh, those were the rooms where this girl beside him was to spend her life—­until that most indulgent father wearied of her modernity and transferred her to other rooms, as barred and screened, in the palace of some husband!...  That thought was brushing Ryder ... with other thoughts of her present risk ... of her lovely eyes, visible again, above the veil, thoughts of the strangeness and unreality of it all ... there in the shrubbery of a pasha’s garden, the pasha’s daughter whispering at his side.

“What about your mother—?” he asked her.  “Is she—?”

“She is dead,” the girl told him, with a drop in her voice.

And after a long moment of silence, “When I was so little—­but I remember her, oh, indeed I do ...  She was French, monsieur.”

“Oh!  And so you—­”

“I am French-Turk,” she whispered back.  “That is very often so—­in the harems of Cairo....  She was so lovely,” said the girl wistfully.  “My father must have loved her very much ... he never brought another wife here.  Always I lived alone with my old nurse and the governesses—­”

“You had—­lessons?”

“Oh, nothing but lessons—­all of that world which was shut away so soon....  French and English and music and the philosophy—­Oh, we Turks are what you call blue stockings, monsieur, shut away with our books and our dreams ... and our memories ...  We are so young and already the real world is a memory....  Sometimes,” she said, with a tremor of suppressed passion in her still little tones, “I could wish that I had died when I was very young and so happy when my father took me traveling in Europe....  I played games on the decks of the ships ...  I had my tea with the English children....  I went down into the hold to play with their dogs...”

She broke off, between a laugh and a sigh, “Dogs are forbidden to Moslems—­but of course you know, if you have been here two years....  And emancipated as we may be, there is no changing the customs.  We must live as our grandmothers lived ... though we are not as our grandmothers are...”