She had told herself that before.  But always there had been the key.  And now there was no key and no escape and her heart broke itself against the iron of necessity.

She had cried the night through.  Morning had brought her exhaustion, not peace but a despairing submission.  Why struggle when the prison gate is shut?  And if there was never to be freedom for her ... never again the sight of that too-remembered face and the sound of that voice—­why, then, as well one fate as another.  And it was too late now to recede.

So she had called upon her pride and summoned her spirit to play its part to protect her from whispers, and surmise and half-contemptuous pity.  She would surrender to this man because she must, and she would win his respect by her dignity and worth, but her soul she would keep its own, in its unsullied dreams ... and in its memories....  Life would be nothing but a hardship, nobly borne.

But now she had seen the man.  Now this wild dislike, this sickening terror.

To be alone with him, to have only the few days grace of courtship which the Mohammadan custom imposes upon the bridegroom, to be forever at his mercy in this solitary palace, with its echoing corridors, its blackened walla, its damp breath of age....

She thought wildly of death.

And all the time she was smiling, bending her cheek to the kiss of a friend, feeling the fingers of some well-wisher press upon her, listening to praises of her beauty....

For she was beautiful.  No image of wax now.  The scarlet of her frightened blood was staining her cheeks, her eyes were bright as the jewels in her diadem, and beneath the thrown-back veil her dark hair revealed its lovely wealth.

“Is she not a rose—­will he not adore her, our Hamdi?” she heard that stout cousin of Hamdi’s say to a companion, and the two stared on appraisingly at the young girl, in her freshness and virginal youth, as if at some toy to invite the jaded appetite of a satiated master.

And still the throng filed by, a strange throng beneath the flickering light and shadow of the mashrubiyeh, slender young Turks or blonde Circassians in their Paris frocks, their eyes tormented or malicious, and here and there, like a green island of calm, some rotund matron grave and serene, her head encircled with an old fashioned turban of gauze, her stout flesh encased in heavy silks, bought at Damask so as not to enrich the Unbelievers at Lyons.

* * * * *

And then the spectacle changed, the black street mantles appeared, yashmaks and tcharchafs, for now the doors were opened to all the feminine world, and there came strange, unknown women, slipping out from their grills for this pleasuring in a palace, old-timers often, draped and turbaned in the fashion of some far province of their youth; women, incredibly fat, in rich stuffs of Asia, their bright, deep-sunken eyes spying delightedly upon the scene, or furtive, poor women, keeping courage in twos and threes.