Disagreeable as these nightly experiences were, they did not at all exhaust Jamileh Khanum’s opportunities of making herself unpleasant. It seemed to Cecil that she was doing her best, with a purposeless malignity, to lower both Azim Bey and his governess in the eyes of the servants. Not feeling inclined to assist in this process, Cecil did her best to keep her followers separate from the rest; but Jamileh Khanum could never pass the group without an insulting word to her, or an expression of hatred directed against Azim Bey, who was stigmatised twenty times a day as the supplanter of his little brother. Cecil’s patience was sorely tasked, for it was a difficult business to maintain her own dignity without infringing the respect due to the Khanum Effendi, and there was no redress. Once on the journey, the Pasha was scarcely ever to be seen, even by Azim Bey; for custom required that the gentlemen should all ride at a considerable distance in front of the harem procession, and for Cecil to have left her companions to lay her grievances before her employer would have been a breach of etiquette amounting to a crime. One of the most disagreeable features of the case was that Jamileh Khanum’s servants imitated their mistress’s behaviour, and even improved upon it. Azim Bey could always take care of himself, and Cecil had spirit enough to secure tolerable respect towards her in her presence, but the treatment which their household received from that of Jamileh Khanum was galling in the extreme. Headed by the Levantine Mdlle. Katrina, who had been lent to her daughter-in-law by the Um-ul-Pasha in view of this journey, the harem attendants did everything in their power to insult and injure the servants of the Bey. What reason there could be for this state of affairs Cecil could not conceive, until it struck her one day, from various signs which she observed, that her slighted admirer, M. Karalampi, was in communication with Jamileh Khanum. As had been the case at Baghdad, the go-between was Mdlle. Katrina. It was of course impossible for her to have any actual intercourse with M. Karalampi, who was in front with the Pasha; but Mdlle. Katrina had a nephew, an ill-conditioned youth of mixed parentage and doubtful nationality, who was continually to be seen hanging about in the neighbourhood of the harem tents. Once or twice Cecil came upon this individual talking to his aunt in secluded corners, a thing which could not have happened if the agas had not diplomatically turned their backs; but it seemed ridiculous to suppose that M. Karalampi’s schemes could be in any way forwarded by the petty persecution which had been set on foot, and she thought little of the matter. It was Um Yusuf who first let her into the secret of the mortifications she had endured, but this was not until Sardiyeh was reached, and they were safe in their own house, and as free from insult as in their courtyard at Baghdad.