Presently then, she found another question to slip into the old woman’s narrative of the pasha’s grief.

“Eh, to hear a man weep,” Miriam was murmuring.  “Her beauty had set its spell upon him, and—­”

“And he lost her so soon.  Three or four years only, was it not,” ventured Aimee, “that they had of life together?”

It seemed that Miriam’s brush missed a stroke.

“Years I forget,” the nurse muttered, “but tears I remember,” and she began to talk of other things.

But it seemed to Aimee that she had answered.  As for that other matter, of the dead Delcasse child, she dared not refer to it, lest Miriam tell the pasha.  But how many times, she remembered, had she been told that she was her mother’s only one!

Yet, oh, to know, to hear all the story, to learn Ryder’s discovery of it!  It was all as strange and startling as a tale of Djinns.  And the life that it held out to her, the enchanted hope of freedom, of aid—­Oh, not again would she refuse his aid!

She had no plans, no purposes.  But that night over her hastily-donned frock she slipped the black street mantle and when at last, after endless waiting, the murmuring old palace was safely still and dark, she stole down the spiral stair and gained the garden.  And then, a phantom among its shadows, she fled to the rose bushes by the gate.

Breathlessly she knelt and dug into the hiding place of that gate’s key.  To the furthest corner her fingers explored the hole, pushing furiously against the earth.  And then she drew back her hand and crushed it against her face to check the nervous sobs.

The hole was empty.  The key was gone.

CHAPTER X

THE RECEPTION

In Tewfick Pasha’s harem everything was astir.

It was the morning of the marriage, almost the very hour when the wedding cortege would bear the bride from her father’s home to the house of her husband.

The invited guests were already arrived and streaming through the reception rooms, a bright, feminine tide in evening toilettes, surrounding the exhibited gifts or pausing about tables of cool syrups, and their soft, low voices, the delicious musical tones of highbred Turkish women, rose like a murmuring of somnolent bees to the tenser regions about, tightening the excitement of haste.

The bride was not yet ready.  Still and white, she was the only image of calm in that fluttering, confusing room.  Her nearer friends were hovering about her, and her maids of honor, two charming little Turks in rose robes, were draping her veil while old Miriam, resplendent in green and silver, endeavored jealously to outmaneuver them.

On her knees, the gnome-like Mrs. Hendricks was adding an orange blossom to the laces on the train.  Then she sat back on her heels, her head a-tilt like a curious bird’s, her eyes beaming sentimentally upon the bride.