Mahmud extended his hand to him with a smile that he might kiss it.

And then Elhaj Beshir conducted him to the door of those secret apartments within which bloom the flowers of bliss and rapture, and throwing it open bent low while the new Sultan passed through.

Only three among the peris of loveliness had preferred eternal loveless slavery to the favours of the new Padishah, and among those who smiled upon the young Sultan as he entered the room, the one who had the happiest, the most radiant face, was the fair Adsalis, who still remained the favourite wife, the Sultana Asseki, even after the great revolution which had turned the whole Empire upside down and made the least to be the greatest and the greatest to stand lowest of all.

Among so many smiling faces hers was the one towards which the tremulously happy and enraptured Sultan hastened full of tender infatuation; she it was whom he raised to his breast and in whose arms he soothed himself with dreams of glory, while she stifled his anxieties with her kisses.

Everything was asleep in the Halls of Felicity, only Love was still awake.  Mahmud, forgetful alike of himself and his empire, pressed to his bosom his dear enchanting Sultana, the most precious of all the treasures he had won that day; but the fair Sultana shuddered from time to time in the midst of his burning embrace.  It seemed to her as if someone was standing behind her back, sobbing and sighing and touching her warm bosom with his cold fingers.

Perchance she could hear the sighing and the sobbing of him who lay sleepless far, far below that bower of rapture, in one of the cold vaults of the Place of Oblivion, thinking of his lost Empire and his lost Eden!

* * * * *

Early next morning the chief captains of the host, the Bashas and the Sheiks, appeared in the Seraglio to greet the new Sultan.  It was only the leaders of the rebels who did not come.

Ever since Sulali had frightened the insurgents by telling them that the cellars of the Seraglio were full of gunpowder, they did not so much as venture to draw near it, and when the public criers recited the invitation of Mahmud in front of the mosques, thousands and thousands of voices shouted as if from one throat: 

“We will not come!”

Not one of them would listen to the invitation from the Seraglio.

“It is a mere ruse,” observed the wise Reis-Effendi.  “They only want to entice us into a mouse-trap to crush us all at a blow like flies caught in honey.”

“A short cut into Paradise that would be,” scornfully observed Orli, who, despite his office of softa, did not hesitate to speak disrespectfully even of Paradise, whither every true believer ought joyfully to hasten.

Last of all “crazy” Ibrahim gave them a piece of advice.

“’Twill be best,” said he, “to gather together from among us our least useful members—­any murderers there may happen to be, or escaped gaol-birds for instance; call them Halil, Musli, and Suleiman, deck them out in the garments of Agas, Begs, and Ulemas, and send them to the Seraglio.  Then, if we see them return to us safe and sound, we can, of course, go ourselves.”