"All is quiet.... I am safe, now.... And so--good-bye, monsieur."

"And this is where you live?" Ryder whispered.

"There--in that wing," she murmured, slipping within the gate, and
he stole after her, and looked across the garden, through a fringe
of date palms, to the outlines of the buildings.

Dim and dark showed the high walls, black as a prison, only here and
there the pale orange oblong of a lighted window.

"Did you climb out the window?" he murmured.

From beneath the veil came a little sound of soft derision.

"But there are always bars, even in the garden windows of the
haremlik!... No, I stole down by an old stair.... That wing, there,
on the right."

Barred on the garden, and on the street the impregnable wooden
screens of the mashrubiyeh, those were the rooms where this girl
beside him was to spend her life--until that most indulgent father
wearied of her modernity and transferred her to other rooms, as
barred and screened, in the palace of some husband!... That thought
was brushing Ryder ... with other thoughts of her present risk ...
of her lovely eyes, visible again, above the veil, thoughts of the
strangeness and unreality of it all ... there in the shrubbery of a
pasha's garden, the pasha's daughter whispering at his side.

"What about your mother--?" he asked her. "Is she--?"

"She is dead," the girl told him, with a drop in her voice.

And after a long moment of silence, "When I was so little--but I
remember her, oh, indeed I do ... She was French, monsieur."

"Oh! And so you--"

"I am French-Turk," she whispered back. "That is very often so--in
the harems of Cairo.... She was so lovely," said the girl wistfully.
"My father must have loved her very much ... he never brought
another wife here. Always I lived alone with my old nurse and the
governesses--"

"You had--lessons?"

"Oh, nothing but lessons--all of that world which was shut away so
soon.... French and English and music and the philosophy--Oh, we
Turks are what you call blue stockings, monsieur, shut away with our
books and our dreams ... and our memories ... We are so young and
already the real world is a memory.... Sometimes," she said, with a
tremor of suppressed passion in her still little tones, "I could
wish that I had died when I was very young and so happy when my
father took me traveling in Europe.... I played games on the decks
of the ships ... I had my tea with the English children.... I went
down into the hol