The chief blackamoor, a shambling, knock-kneed, round-shouldered, swollen-paunched apology for a man, with blistered, cracked lips, jaundiced pig eyes, and the skin of a terrapin, looked her all over, grunted his approval, and with a side-lunge of his fat empty head, indicated the divan which was to be hers during the years of her imprisonment.

One night some words passed between the two over the division of bonbons, perhaps, or whose turn it was to take afternoon tea with the prince—­it had generally been the new houri’s, resulting in considerable jealousy and consequent discord—­or some trifle of that sort (Joe had never been in a harem, and was therefore indefinite), when the blackamoor, to punctuate his remarks, slashed the odalisque across her thinly covered shoulders with a knout—­a not uncommon mode of enforcing discipline, so Joe assured me.

Then came the great scene of the third act—­ always the place for it, so dramatists say.

The dark-skinned houri sprang up, rose to her full height, her eyes blazing, and facing her tormentor, cried: 

“You blackguard”—­a true statement—­“do you know who I am?”

“Yes, perfectly; you are Yuleima, the daughter of the Bagdad merchant.”

The fourth act takes place on the outskirts of Stamboul, in a small house surrounded by a high wall which connects with the garden of a mosque.  The exposure by the eunuch had resulted in an investigation by the palace clique, which extended to the Bagdad merchant and his family, who, in explanation, not only denounced her as an ungrateful child, cursing her for her opposition to her sovereign’s will, but denied all knowledge of her whereabouts.  They supposed, they pleaded, that she had thrown herself into the Bosphorus at the loss of her lover.  Then followed the bundling up of Yuleima in the still watches of the night; her bestowal at the bottom of a caique, her transfer to Stamboul, and her incarceration in charge of an attendant in a deserted house belonging to the mosque.  The rumor was then set on foot that it was unlawful to look steadily into the waters of the Bosphorus or to attempt the salvage of any derelict body floating by.

The prince made another assault on his hair and tightened his fingers, this time with a movement as if he was twisting them round somebody’s throat, but he made no outcry.  It is hard to kick against the pricks in some lands.

He did not believe the bow-string pillow-case and solid-shot story, but he knew that he should never look upon her face again.  What he did believe was that she had been taken to some distant city and there sold.