So at last he came to the top of the hill, where in a grassy clearing a small house looked down on the valley of the Bosphorus through a row of great stone pines. The door of the kiosque was open, but his wife was not visible. The Pasha stopped a moment, as he had done a thousand times before, and looked back. He was not the man to be insensible to what he saw between the columnar trunks of the pines, where European hills traced a dark curve against the fading sky, and where the sinuous waterway far below still reflected a last glamour of the day. The beauty of it, and the sharp sweetness of the April air, and the infinitesimal sounds of the wood, and the half-conscious memories involved with it all, made him sigh. He turned and mounted the steps of the porch. The kiosque looked very dark and unfamiliar as the Pasha entered it. He wondered what had become of Helene--if by any chance he had passed her on the way. He wanted her. She was the expression of what the evening roused in him. He heard nothing, however, but the splash of water from a half-invisible fountain. It reminded him for an instant, of the other fountain, below, and of Shaban. His steps resounded hollowly on the marble pavement as he walked into the dim old saloon, shaped like a T, with the cross longer than the leg. It was still light enough for him to make out the glimmer of windows on three sides and the square of the fountain in the centre, but the painted domes above were lost in shadow. The spaces on either side of the bay by which he entered, completing the rectangle of the kiosque, were filled by two little rooms opening into the cross of the T. He went into the left-hand one, where Helene usually sat--because there were no lattices. The room was empty. The place seemed so strange and still in the twilight that a sort of apprehension began to grow in him, and he half wished he had brought up Shaban. He turned back to the second, the latticed room--the harem, as they called it. Curiously enough it was Helene who would never let him Europeanize it, in spite of the lattices. Every now and then he discovered that she liked some Turkish things better than he did. As soon as he opened the door he saw her sitting on the divan opposite. He knew her profile against the checkered pallor of the lattice. But she neither moved nor greeted him. It was Zuembuel Agha who did so, startling him by suddenly rising beside the door and saying in his high voice,-- 'Pleasant be your coming, my Pasha.' The Pasha had forgotten about Zuembuel Agha; and it seemed strange to him that Helene continued to sit silent and motionless on her sofa. 'Good evening,' he said at last. 'You are sitting very quietly here in the dark. Are there no lights in this place?' It was again Zuembuel Agha who spoke, turning one question by another:-- 'Did Shaban come with you?' 'No,' replied the Pasha shortly. 'He said he had had a message, but I told him not to come.'