e evasion. But
there it was, for as much as it was worth....

Presently then, she found another question to slip into the old
woman's narrative of the pasha's grief.

"Eh, to hear a man weep," Miriam was murmuring. "Her beauty had set
its spell upon him, and--"

"And he lost her so soon. Three or four years only, was it not,"
ventured Aimee, "that they had of life together?"

It seemed that Miriam's brush missed a stroke.

"Years I forget," the nurse muttered, "but tears I remember," and
she began to talk of other things.

But it seemed to Aimee that she had answered. As for that other
matter, of the dead Delcasse child, she dared not refer to it, lest
Miriam tell the pasha. But how many times, she remembered, had she
been told that she was her mother's only one!

Yet, oh, to know, to hear all the story, to learn Ryder's discovery
of it! It was all as strange and startling as a tale of Djinns. And
the life that it held out to her, the enchanted hope of freedom, of
aid--Oh, not again would she refuse his aid!

She had no plans, no purposes. But that night over her
hastily-donned frock she slipped the black street mantle and when at
last, after endless waiting, the murmuring old palace was safely
still and dark, she stole down the spiral stair and gained the
garden. And then, a phantom among its shadows, she fled to the rose
bushes by the gate.

Breathlessly she knelt and dug into the hiding place of that gate's
key. To the furthest corner her fingers explored the hole, pushing
furiously against the earth. And then she drew back her hand and
crushed it against her face to check the nervous sobs.

The hole was empty. The key was gone.

CHAPTER X

THE RECEPTION

In Tewfick Pasha's harem everything was astir.

It was the morning of the marriage, almost the very hour when the
wedding cortege would bear the bride from her father's home to the
house of her husband.

The invited guests were already arrived and streaming through the
reception rooms, a bright, feminine tide in evening toilettes,
surrounding the exhibited gifts or pausing about tables of cool
syrups, and their soft, low voices, the delicious musical tones of
highbred Turkish women, rose like a murmuring of somnolent bees to
the tenser regions about, tightening the excitement of haste.

The bride was not yet ready. Still and white, she was the only image
of calm in that fluttering, confusing room. Her nearer friends were
hovering about