But she must listen to her father.  He was talking now about the powers of wealth, not merely the nominal riches of his somewhat precarious political affiliations, but solid, sustaining, invested and invulnerable wealth.

Unexpectedly Aimee laughed.  “He must be very plain,” she declared, her face brightening with mockery, “if you take so long to tell me his name!”

Not, she added to herself under her breath, that any name would weigh a feather’s difference!

“On the contrary,” and the pasha’s eyes met hers frankly for the first time and he seemed delighted to indulge a laugh, “he has the reputation of good looks.  He is much a la mode.”

“Beautiful and golden—­did you meet him just to-night, my father?” Aimee went on, in that light audacity which he had loved to indulge.

Now he smiled, but his glance went uneasily away from her.

“Not at all.  This is a serious affair, you understand—­the devil of a serious affair!” and for the first time she felt she heard the accents of his candor.

But again he was back to voluble protestation.  This man was really an old friend.  He boggled over the word, then got it out resonantly.  A man he knew well.  Not a young man, perhaps—­certainly he was not going to hand his only daughter to any boy, a mere novice in life!—­but a man who could give her the position she deserved.  Not only a rich man, but an influential one.

His name, he brought out at last, was Hamdi Bey.  He was a general in the armies of the sultan.

It was a long moment before she could piece any shreds of recollection together.

Hamdi Bey ...  A general....  Why, that was a man her father had disliked ... more than once he had dropped resentful phrases of his airs, his arrogance ... had recounted certain clashes with malicious joy.

And now he was planning—­no, seriously announcing—­

A general ...  He must be terribly old....

Not that it made any difference.  Old or young, black or white, general or ghikar, would mean nothing in her life.  She would have none of him ... none of him....  Never would she endure the humiliation of being handed over like a toy, an odalisque, a slave....

What had happened?  She could only suppose that her father had been overcome by that wealth of the general’s on which he had made her such a speech.  Or perhaps his dislike of Hamdi had been founded on nothing but resentment of Hamdi’s airs of superiority, and now that the bey was condescending to ask for her hand her father’s flattered appeasement was rushing into genial acceptance.

Anything might be possible to Tewfick Pasha’s eternally youthful enthusiasms.

She told her frightened heart that she was not afraid....  Her father would never really fail her....  And she would never surrender to this degradation; for all her fright and all her flinching from defiance she divined in herself some hidden stuff of resistance, tenacious to endure ... some strain of daring which had made her brave that wild escapade to-night.