And then her hands became aware of the bars she had been unconsciously clasping, white-painted bars extending across the window.  They were of iron.

Not even here was there freedom, she thought with a throb of dread, not even here where one faced dark gardens and blank walls and the empty west.

* * * * *

Somehow that dinner had passed, that queer dinner in the candle light between the silent, painted woman and the politely talkative young man, and passed without a word from outside for the girl whose nerves were fraying with the suspense.  The old woman and the little girl had served them with a meal which would have been judged delicious in any European hotel and though Arlee’s nerves were tricky her young appetite was not and she ate and talked with a determined little air of trying to dissipate the strangeness of the situation.

And with the coffee came inspiration.  She began to plan ... half listening to the Captain’s amiable efforts to entertain her with an account of the palace, and of its history under Ismail, the Mad Khedive, who had occupied it for some months, tearing down and building in his feverish way, only to weary at the first hint of completion.  She was wondering why in the world the inspiration had not arrived at once.  Perhaps something in this fatalistic air, this stupid acceptance of authority had numbed her.

With alacrity she accepted the Captain’s suggestion of a stroll in the garden, and was relieved when the silent sister did not rise to accompany them, but remained in the candle-light with her coffee and cigarette.  She found the woman’s lightly mocking, watchful eyes, the enigmatic smile upon the carmined lips, increasingly hard to bear.  That woman didn’t like her—­she had failed, somehow, to propitiate her hostile curiosities.

Back through the old empty rooms of the past, the Captain led her, and passing by the screened alcove from which Arlee had looked down into the ancient banquet hall he came to a small dark painted door which he unlocked.  The door opened upon a flight of worn and narrow stone steps descending into the garden.

* * * * *

It had been night in the palace of darkened windows but in the garden it was yet day, although the rose and gold of sunset had faded to paling pinks and translucent ambers and in the east the stars were shining in the deepening blue.  It was the same garden on which her windows opened; Arlee recognized the huge lebbek tree in the center, the row of acacias, and the palms against the farthest wall.  It was a very old garden.  Those trees must have seen many, many years, she thought, and felt again that sense of vague oppression and melancholy which the lonely rooms of the palace had given her; that row of acacias which cast such crooked shadows over the path had been planted by very long-ago hands.

So she thought fleetingly, then stared about, her concern for other things.  Captain Kerissen lighted a cigarette; over his cupped hands his eyes followed hers searchingly.