As we had decided, Kondje-Gul has been separated from her over-jealous companions. Hadidje, Zouhra, and Nazli have taken this measure to be a confirmation of her disgrace, and knowing that she lives in a sequestered corner of the house, they fancy their triumph more assumed than ever. I can place implicit confidence in the discretion of my servants--who wait on us like mutes in a seraglio: consequently Kondje-Gul and I are as free as possible. When I want to go out with her, I pay a short visit to my wives, and after a quarter of an hour's talk, leave them and go off in my carriage, in the recesses of which my darling reclines. Now you see what a simple device it is and how ingenious; still it involves a certain amount of constraint for me, and an isolation hard to endure for Kondje-Gul. She reads and devours everything that I bring her in the way of books; but the days are long, and Mohammed, with his time taken up by the others, cannot accompany her out of doors. I therefore conceived the idea of taking her away from the harem altogether, and thus relieving her of the contemptuous insults which my other silly women still find opportunities of inflicting upon her. The difficulty was to procure a chaperon for her, some kind of suitable and reliable duenna whom I could leave with her in a separate establishment; this duenna has been found. The other day Kondje-Gul and I were talking together about a little house which I had discovered in the upper part of the Champs Elysees, and of an English governess, who seemed to me to possess the right qualifications for a pretended mother: "If you like," said Kondje-Gul, "I can tell you a much simpler arrangement." "Well?" I replied. "Instead of this governess whom I don't know, I would much rather have my mother. I should be so happy at seeing her again!" "Your mother?" I exclaimed with surprise; "do you know where she is then?" "Oh, yes! for I often write to her." She then told me all her past history, which I had never before thought of asking her, believing that she had been left alone in the world. It afforded me a complete revelation of those Turkish customs which seem so strange to us. Kondje-Gul's mother, as I have told you, was a Circassian, who came to Constantinople to enter the service of a cadine of the Sultan. Kondje-Gul being a very pretty child, her mother had, in her ambitious fancy, anticipated from her beauty a brilliant career for her. In order to realise this expectation, she left her at twelve years old with a family who were instructed to bring her up better than she could have done herself, until Kondje-Gul was old enough to be sought after as a cadine or a wife.