was like an ogre sitting down to a delicate
dish of her young innocence, her childish terrors, her frank
fears....

She could not have told why she found him so horrible, but
everything in her shrank convulsively from him.

And the need of courtesy to him, of propititation--!

The cup was bitterer than her darkest dreams.... She wondered how
many other women had drained such deadly brews... had sat in such
ghastly despair, before some other bridegroom, affable, confident,
masterful....

She told herself that she was overwrought, hysterical. The man was
courteous. He was trying to be agreeable, to make a little expected
love. He had drank a little too much--another time she might find
him different. He was probably no worse than any other man of her
world.

It was not in her world, each young Turkish girl said in those days,
that one could find love.

But it was _not_ her world! It was an alien world, enforced,
imprisoning.... That was the bitterest gall of all the deadly cup.

"There is no need for haste," he was assuring her. "In a moment I
will call your woman. Fatima, her name is, an old slave of our
house."

"I could wish," said Aimee, "that I had been permitted to bring my
old nurse, Miriam, without whom I feel strange--"

"No old nurses--I know their wiles," laughed the bey, setting down
his drained cup with a wavering hand. "They are never for the
husbands, those old nurses--we will have no old trot's tricks here!"

He laughed again. "This Fatima is a watch dog, I warn you, my little
one ... but if she does not please you, we can find another. And as
for the rooms--I have assigned this suite to you, the suite of
honor. This is the salon, and there," he pointed to a curtained door
behind them, opening into a small room that Aimee had already seen,
"there is your boudoir and beyond that, your sleeping apartment. I
have had them done over for you, but you shall choose your own
furnishings--everything shall be to your taste, I promise you. You
are too sweet to deny. You have but to ask--"

Certainly, she thought, he was drunk. He moved his head so jerkily
and his whole body swayed so queerly. Desperately she fought against
her horror. Perhaps it was better for him to be drunk.

Drunken men grow sleepy. Perhaps he would fall down and sleep.
Perhaps she ought to urge him to drink. Long ago the black had left
the bottle at his elbow and gone out of his room.

But she did not move. She sat back in her c