and I guessed at once. McLean and I
went to the pasha--Oh, I didn't tell him I'd met you!" he flung in,
his eyes twinkling, "and we pretended we knew all about his marriage
to Madame Delcasse and he owned up without a quiver. But when we
tried to claim you for the French family, he doubled like a hare. He
said the Delcasse child was dead, died when his own child was a
baby, and that you were his own. But I was sure that you were more
than fourteen, and that he was simply putting it over on us so as to
have this marriage go on without interference--and so I tried to get
the story to you. Even now I thought you ought to know," he added,
as if in palliation of his invasion here.

For he realized now how tremendous an invasion it was.

All the guests about him had not given him that feeling, all that
sea of femininity, those grave matrons whose serenely unveiled faces
would burn with shame to be beheld by this stranger, those bright,
slim girls in their extravagant frocks, their tulle, their lace,
their pearls, their diamonds, all the hidden charms that no man had
yet seen stirred in him no more than an excited and adventurous
curiosity.

But the vision of Aimee--that delicate beauty in its tragic irony
of throne and diadem! It touched him to tenderness and to an actual
sense of sacrilege at the freedom of his gaze. No moonlight vision
this, ethereal and dream-like, but a vivid, disquieting radiance of
dark, shining eyes and rose-flushed cheeks. He had never seen her
hair before, midnight hair, escaping little curls from the veil and
the diadem. And he had never really seen her mouth--wistful and gay,
like the mouth of the miniature ... nor her chin, so tender and
willful ... nor her skin, satin-soft, in its veiling from the
daylight....

She was more than young and sweet and fair. She was beauty, beauty
with its elusive, ineluctable spell, entangled with the appeal of
her helplessness.

A bright blush flooded her now and her eyes fell in confusion,
before the prolonging of his look.

"But it is dangerous--your being here," she murmured.

"The fortieth door," he reminded her.

Under her breath, "Ah, you remember?"

"I remember. And but last night I heard Khazib, the story teller,
tell the tale, and I thought of you and your warning--of the door
that hid you, that it was forbidden for me to open."

"And so you opened it, monsieur." Faintly she smiled, with downcast
lashes.

"And I came as you first came to m