g stuff and spread it curiously
across her fingers. A dinner gown.... When she wore this she would
be a wife.... The wife of Hamdi Bey.... A shiver went through her
and she dropped the tulle swiftly.

In ten days more....

Gone was her first rush of sustaining compassion. Gone was her
fear for her father and her tenderness to him. Only this numb
coldness, this dumb, helpless certainty of a destiny about to be
accomplished.... Only this hopeless, useless brooding upon that
strange brief past.

There was a stir at the door and on her shuffling, slippered feet
old Miriam entered, handing some packages to Madame de Coulevain.
Then she turned to revolve about the bright figure of her young
mistress, her eyes glistening fondly, her dark fingers touching a
soft fold of silver ribbon, while under her breath she chanted in a
croon like a lullaby, "Beautiful as the dawn ... she will walk upon
the heart of her husband with foot of rose petals ... she will
dazzle him with the beams of her eyes and with the locks of her
hair, she will bind him to her ... beautiful as the dawn...."

It was the marriage chant of Miriam's native village, an old love
song that had come down the wind of centuries.

Mrs. Hendricks, thrusting in the final pins, paid not the slightest
attention and Madame de Coulevain displayed interest only in the
packages. If she saw the stiffening of the girl's face and the rigid
aversion of her eyes from the old nurse's adulation she gave no
sign.

Towards Aimee's moods madame preserved a calm and sensible
detachment. Never had she invited confidence, and for all the young
girl's charm she had never taken her to her heart in the place of
that absent daughter. As if jealously she had held herself aloof
from such devotion.

Perhaps in Aimee's indulged and petted childhood, with a fond pasha
extolling her small triumphs, her dances, her score at tennis at the
legation, madame found a bitter contrast to the lot of that lonely
child in France. Certainly there was nothing in Aimee's life then to
invite compassion, and later, during those hard, mutinous months of
the girl's first veiling and seclusion, she had not tried to soften
the inevitable for her with a useless compassion.

So now, perceiving this marriage as one more step in the
irresistible march of destiny for her charge, she overlooked the
youthful fretting and offered the example of her own unmoved
acceptance.

"What diamonds!" she said now admiringly,