“But there is no harm in a garden,” breathed the girl, her face hot with shame.  “To-night was so hot—­”

“Is there no coolth upon the roof?”

“But the roses—­”

“Can roses not be brought you?  Have you no maids to attend you?”

“I am tired of being attended!  Can I never be alone—­”

“Alone in the garden!...  A pretty talk!  Eh, I will tell thy father, I will have a stop put to this—­hush, would you have him hear?” she admonished, in a sudden whisper, as they opened the little door at the foot of the dark well of spiral steps.

Like conspirators they fled up the staircase, and then with fumbling haste the old nurse dragged off the girl’s mantle and veil, muttering at the pins that secured it.  She shook out the pale-flowered chiffon of her rumpled frock and gathered back a strand of her dark, disordered hair.

“Say that you were on the roofs,” she besought her.

For a moment the girl put the warm rose of her cheek against the old woman’s dark, wrinkled one.

“But you are good, Dadi,” she said softly, using the Turkish word for familiar old servants.

With a sound of mingled vexation and affection Miriam pushed her ahead of her into the drawing-room.

It was a long, dark room, on whose soft, buff carpet the little gilt chairs and sofas were set about with the empty expectancy of a stage scene in a French salon.  French were the shirred, silk shades upon the electric lamps, French the music upon the chic rosewood piano.

And then, as if some careless property man had overlooked them in changing the act, two window balconies of closely carved old wood, of solidly screening mashrubiyeh wood, jutted out from one cream-tinted wall, and above a gilded sofa, upholstered in the delicate fabric of the Rue de la Paix, hung a green satin banner embroidered in silver with a phrase from the Koran.

Tewfick Pasha was at one side of the room, filling his match case.  He was in evening dress, a ribbon of some order across a rather swelling shirt bosom, a red fez upon his dark head.

At his daughter’s entrance he turned quickly, with so sharp a gleam from his full, somewhat protuberant black eyes that her guilty heart fairly turned over in her.

It made matters no more comforting to have Miriam packed from the room.

She would deny it all, she thought desperately ...  No, she would admit it, and implore his indulgence....  She would admit nothing but the garden....  She would admit the ball....  She would never admit the young man....

With conscious eyes and flushing cheeks, woefully aware of dew-drenched satin slippers and an upsettingly hammering heart, Aimee presented the young image of irresolute confusion.

To her surprise there was no outburst.  Her father was suddenly gay and smiling, with a flow of pleasant phrases that invited her affection.  In his good humor—­and Tewfick Pasha liked always to be kept in good humor—­he had touches of that boyish charm that had made him the enfant gate of Paris and Vienna as well as Cairo and Constantinople.  An enfant no more, in the robustly rotund forties, his cheerful self-indulgence demanded still of his environment that smiling acquiescence that kept life soft and comfortable.