“You saw?” she said excitedly. “You remember? Then you understand! You yourself were near death when I took the bracelet last night. The time was up. I would have stabbed you if you had tried to prevent me!” Now he spoke at last and gave her a first glimpse of an angle of his mind she had not suspected. “Princess,” he said. He used the word with the deference some men can combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs. “You might have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger for it at any time. A word by a servant would have been enough. “You could never have reached Khinjan then!” she retorted. Her eyes flashed again, but his did not waver. “Princess,” he said, “why speak of what you don't know?” He thought she would strike like a snake, but she smiled at him instead. And when Yasmini has smiled on a man he has never been just the same man afterward. He knows more, for one thing. He has had a lesson in one of the finer arts. “I will speak of what I do know,” she said. “No, there is no need. Look! Look!” She pointed at the bed--at the man on the bed--fingers locked in those of a woman who looked so like herself. “You see--yet you do not see! Men are blind! Men look into a mirror, and see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before. Women look once and then remember! Look again!” He looked, knowing well there was something to be understood, that stared him in the face. But for the life of him he could not determine question or answer. “What is in your bosom?” she asked him. He put his hand to his shirt. “Draw it out!” she said, as a teacher drills a child. He drew out the gold-hilted knife with the bronze blade, with which a man had meant to murder him. He let it lie on the palm of his hand and looked from it to her and back again. The hilt might have been a portrait of her modeled from the life. “Here is another like it,” she said, stepping to the bedside. She drew back the woman's dress at the bosom and showed a knife exactly like that in King's hand. “One lay on her bosom and one on his when I found them!” she said. “Now, think again!” He did think, of thirty thousand possibilities, and of one impossible idea that stood up prominent among them all and insisted on seeming the only likely one. “I saw the knife in your bosom last night,” she said, “and laughed so that I nearly wakened you. Man! Are you stupid? Will that ready wit of yours not work? Have I bewildered you? Is it my perfume? My eyes? My jewels? What is it? Think, man! Think!” But if she wanted to make him guess aloud for her amusement she was wasting time. Had he known the answer he would have held his tongue. As he did not know it, he had all the more reason to wait indefinitely, if need be. But interminable waiting was no part of her plan. Words were welling out of her.