'Nonsense!' She gave him a look that had more in it than the tone in which she added, 'Please do not. I shall be perfectly safe with four servants. You can tell them not to let me run away.' Coming nearer, she put her hand into the bosom of her dress, then stretched out the hand toward him. 'Here is the key--the key of Pandora's box. Will you keep it for me please? Au revoir.' And making a sign to the servants she walked out of the kiosque. IV The Pasha was too surprised, at first, to move--and too conscious of the eyes of servants, too uncertain of what he should do, too fearful of doing the wrong, the un-European, thing. And afterwards it was too late. He stood watching until the flicker of the lantern disappeared among the dark trees. Then his eyes met the eunuch's. 'Why don't you go down too?' suggested Zuembuel Agha. The variable climate of a great house had made him too perfect an opportunist not to take the line of being in favor again. 'It might be better. Give me the key and I will do what there is to do. But you might send up Shaban.' Why not? the Pasha secretly asked himself. Might it not be the best way out? At the same time he experienced a certain revulsion of feeling, now that Helene was gone, in the way she had gone. She really was prodigious! And with the vanishing of the lantern which had brought him a measure of reassurance he felt the weight of an uncleared situation, fantastic but crucial, heavy upon him. And the Negro annoyed him intensely. 'Thank you, Zuembuel Agha,' he replied, 'but I am not the nurse of madama, and I will not give you the key.' If he only might, though, he thought to himself again! 'You believe her, this Frank woman whom you had never seen five years ago, and you do not believe me who have lived in your house longer than you can remember!' The eunuch said it so bitterly that the Pasha was touched in spite of himself. He had never been one to think very much about minor personal relations, but even at such a moment he could see--was it partly because he wanted more time to make up his mind?--that he had never liked Zuembuel Agha as he liked Shaban, for instance. Yet more honor had been due, in the old family tradition, to the former. And he had been associated even longer with the history of the house. 'My poor Zuembuel,' he uttered musingly, 'you have never forgiven me for marrying her.' 'My Pasha, you are not the first to marry an unbeliever, nor the last. But such a marriage should be to the glory of Islam, and not to its discredit. Who can trust her? She is still a Christian. And she is too young. She has turned the world upside down. What would your father have said to a daughter-in-law who goes shamelessly into the street without a veil, alone, and who receives in your house men who are no relation to you or her? It is not right. Women only understand one thing, to make fools of men. And they are never content to fool one.'