She glanced at the glittering table.

“But I do not find this so—­so much of the old school.  Here one does not eat rice with the fingers!”

“And I?” said the bey, leaning suddenly towards her on his outspread arm.  “Do you find me too much of the old school?  Eh? eh?”

“But you, monsieur,” she stammered, still looking down, “you—­I do not know you—­not yet.”

“Not—­yet.  Excellent!  There will be time.”

“I confess that now I am weary—­”

“Ah,—­and that diadem is heavy.  Your head must ache with it,” he said solicitously.

Perhaps it was the diadem that gave her that leaden, constricted sense of a band tightening about her forehead.  She put up her hands to it.

“Permit me,” he said quickly, springing to his feet.  “Permit me to aid you.”

He stepped behind her and bent over her.  She held her head very still, stiff with distaste, and felt the weight lifted.  He surveyed the circlet a moment then placed it upon the marriage throne behind her.  She had an ironic memory of the false omen of her crowning, of soft, satisfied little Ghul-al-Din’s bestowal of her own happiness....  Happiness, indeed....

“And that veil—­surely that is incommoding?” suggested the suave voice, and she felt the touch of his hands on her hair where the misty veil was secured.

She stammered that it was quite light—­she would not trouble him—­

Then she held herself rigid, for suddenly he had swept the veil aside and bent to press his lips to that most hidden of all veiled sanctities, for a Moslem, the back of her neck.

She did not stir.  She sat fixed and tense.  Then slowly the blood came back to her heart, for he was moving away from her again to his place at the table.

Laughing a little, pulling at his blond mustache in a gesture of conquest, his kindling eyes glinting down at her, “You must forgive the precipitateness—­of a lover,” he murmured.  “You do not know your own beauty.  You are like a crystal in which the world has thrown no reflections.  All is pure and transparent—­”

If she did not find words to answer him, to divert his admiration, she felt that she was lost.

“You are not complimentary—­a bit of glass, monsieur, instead of a diamond!  But I am too weary to be exacting....  If now, you will permit me to bid you good evening and withdraw—­”

“Little trembler,” said the general facetiously, and reached out a hand to touch her cheek, the light, reassuring caress that one might give a petted child, but it almost brought a cry of nervous terror from her lips.

She thought that if he touched her again she would scream.  He inspired her with a horrible fear.  There was something so false, so smiling in him... he was like an ogre sitting down to a delicate dish of her young innocence, her childish terrors, her frank fears....

She could not have told why she found him so horrible, but everything in her shrank convulsively from him.