A small table was brought to the end of the room near the marriage throne where all the day she had paraded; a richly embroidered cloth of satin was flung over it, and from crowding candelabra fresh lights shed down a little circle of brilliance.

Faintly Aimee protested that eat she could not, and then she made a feint of eating, lingering over her sherbets, because eating was, after all, so safe and uncomplicated a thing.

The black brought champagne in its jacket of ice and filled their glasses.

The general rose. “A notre bonheur—­to our happiness,” he declared, holding out his glass, and she clinked her own to it and brought her lips to touch the brim, but not to that toast could she swallow a single one of the bubbles that went winking up and down the hollow stem.

The glass trembled suddenly in her hand as she set it down.  An overpowering sense of fatigue was upon her.  With the death of her poor hope, with the collapse of all those flighty, childish dreams, the leaden weight of realities seemed to descend crushingly upon her.  She felt stricken, inert, apathetic.

It was all so unreal, so bizarre.  This could not possibly be taking place in her life, this fantastic scene, this table set with lights and food at the end of a dark, deserted old room opposite this grimacing, foppish stranger....

She could barely master strength for her replies.  How had it all gone?  Excellently?  She was satisfied with her new home?  With the service?  The appointments?

He plied her with questions and she tried to summon her spirit:  she achieved a few perfunctory phrases, the words of a frightened child struggling for its manners.  She tried to smile, unconscious of the betrayal of her eyes.

He told her, sketchily, of his day.  A bore, those affairs, those speeches, he told her, gazing at her, his wine glass in his hand, a flush of wine and excitement in his face.  She found it unpleasant to look at him.  Her glance evaded his.

She stammered a word of praise for the palace.  It must be very ancient, she told him.  Very—­interesting.

He waved a hand on which an enormous ruby glittered.  He could tell her stories of it, he promised.  It had been built by one of the Mamelukes, his ancestor.  Its old banqueting hall was still untouched—­the collectors would give much to rifle that, but they would never get their sharks’ noses in.  Nothing had been changed, but something added.  Once the Mad Khedive had borrowed it for some years and begun his eternal additions.

“Forty girls, they say, he kept here,” smiled Hamdi Bey.  “They gulped their pleasure, in those days.  It is better to sip, is it not?”

He smiled.  “But these are no stories for a bride!  I only trust that you will not find your palace dull.  It is very quiet now, very much of the old school.  You may miss your pianos, your electricity, all your pretty Parisian modernity.”