* * * * *

The pasha did not dine with his daughter that night.  He had been avoiding her of late, a natural reaction from the strain of too-excessive gratitude.  A man cannot be continually humble before the young!  And it was no pleasure to be reminded by her candid eyes of his late misfortunes and of her absurd reluctance towards matrimony.

As if this marriage were not the best thing for her!  As if it were a hardship!  To make sad eyes and draw a mouth because one is to be the wife of a rich general....  Irrational ...  The little sweetmeat was irritating.

To this point Tewfick’s buoyancy had brought him, and all the more hastily because of his eagerness to escape the pangs of that uncomfortable self-reproach.  To Aimee, in her new clear-sightedness of misery, it was bitterly apparent that he was reconciled with her lot and careless of it.

So blinded had been her young affection that it was a hard awakening, and she was too young, too cruelly involved, to feel for his easy humors that amused tolerance of larger acquaintance with human nature.  She had grown swiftly bitter and resentful, and deeply cold.

And now this letter.  It dazed her, like a flame of lightning before her eyes, and then, like lightning, it lit up the world with terrifying luridity.  Fiery colored, unfamiliar, her life trembled about her.

Truth or lies?  Custom and habit stirred incredulously to reject the supposition.  The romance, the adventure of youth, dared its swift acceptance.  How could she know?  Intuitively she shrank from any question to the pasha, realizing the folly and futility of exposing her suspicion.  If he needed to lie, lie he would—­and in her understanding of that, she read her own acceptance of the possibility of his needing to lie.

Madame de Coulevain?  Madame had never known her mother.  Only old Miriam had known her mother and Miriam was the pasha’s slave.  But the old woman was unsuspecting now, and full of disarming comfort in this marriage of her wild darling.

Through dinner she planned the careless-seeming questions.  And then in her negligee, as the old nurse brushed out her hair for the night, “Dadi,” said the girl, in a faint voice, “am I truly like my mother?” and when Miriam had finished her fond protestation that they were as like as two roses, as two white roses, bloom and bud, she launched that little cunning phrase on which she had spent such eager hoping.

“And was I like her when I was little—­when first she came to my father?”

“Eh—­yes.  Always thou wast the tiny image which Allah—­Glory to his Name!—­had made of her,” came the nurse’s assurance.

“I am glad,” said Aimee, in a trembling voice.

She dared not press that more.  Confronted with her unconscious admission the old woman would destroy it, feigning some evasion.  But there it was, for as much as it was worth....