And the need of courtesy to him, of propititation—!

The cup was bitterer than her darkest dreams....  She wondered how many other women had drained such deadly brews... had sat in such ghastly despair, before some other bridegroom, affable, confident, masterful....

She told herself that she was overwrought, hysterical.  The man was courteous.  He was trying to be agreeable, to make a little expected love.  He had drank a little too much—­another time she might find him different.  He was probably no worse than any other man of her world.

It was not in her world, each young Turkish girl said in those days, that one could find love.

But it was not her world!  It was an alien world, enforced, imprisoning....  That was the bitterest gall of all the deadly cup.

“There is no need for haste,” he was assuring her.  “In a moment I will call your woman.  Fatima, her name is, an old slave of our house.”

“I could wish,” said Aimee, “that I had been permitted to bring my old nurse, Miriam, without whom I feel strange—­”

“No old nurses—­I know their wiles,” laughed the bey, setting down his drained cup with a wavering hand.  “They are never for the husbands, those old nurses—­we will have no old trot’s tricks here!”

He laughed again.  “This Fatima is a watch dog, I warn you, my little one ... but if she does not please you, we can find another.  And as for the rooms—­I have assigned this suite to you, the suite of honor.  This is the salon, and there,” he pointed to a curtained door behind them, opening into a small room that Aimee had already seen, “there is your boudoir and beyond that, your sleeping apartment.  I have had them done over for you, but you shall choose your own furnishings—­everything shall be to your taste, I promise you.  You are too sweet to deny.  You have but to ask—­”

Certainly, she thought, he was drunk.  He moved his head so jerkily and his whole body swayed so queerly.  Desperately she fought against her horror.  Perhaps it was better for him to be drunk.

Drunken men grow sleepy.  Perhaps he would fall down and sleep.  Perhaps she ought to urge him to drink.  Long ago the black had left the bottle at his elbow and gone out of his room.

But she did not move.  She sat back in her chair, withdrawn and shrinking, watching him out of those dark, terrified eyes.

“You are beautiful as dreams,” he told her, leaning towards her with such abruptness that his sword struck clankingly against the table.  “Beyond even the words of my babbling cousin—­eh, Allah reward her!—­but she did me a good turn with her talk of you!”

Fixedly he stared at her, out of those intent, inflamed eyes.

“I did not know that there was anything like you in the harems of Cairo.  You are like a vision of the old poets—­but I suppose that you do not know the ancient poetry.  You little moderns are brought up upon French and English and music and know little of the Arabic and the Persian....  I daresay that you have never heard of the poet Utayyah.”