Her anger knew no bounds. She summoned the Abyssinian. He appeared before the presence of his sovereign, not without some suspicion of what was about to take place. Bameea stood behind the Queen. She saw by the scowl upon the royal brow that no good was intended towards the object of her love. The eye of Ruzeea Begum was restless, and her fingers trembled as she dipped them into the ewer of perfume that stood beside her. Her full expressive mouth was closed with a compression that indicated suppressed emotion, and the full undulating lip occasionally quivered. Her head was raised haughtily as the Ameer-ool-Omrah entered, and she fixed upon him her large penetrating eye with so searching a scrutiny that it seemed as if it would have reached the very core of his heart. He met her gaze with calm reverence; and having made his obeisance, stood before her with the unbending dignity of a man who has secured the approbation of his own conscience. For several moments the Sultana did not speak, and in her presence no one of course ventured to break the silence. Bameea trembled as she perceived the rising agitation of her sovereign, which was evidently increased by the unperturbed demeanour of the person whom she had summoned. Ruzeea Begum at length finding the ebullition rising to her throat, by a sudden effort suppressed it, and passing her hand gently across her brow, as if to dispel the cloud which for a moment overshadowed it, she said, in a tolerably calm tone, “Yakoot”--but her voice slightly trembled, and she eagerly swallowed a copious draught of sherbet. “Yakoot,”--she had now regained her self-possession--“say, what does that man deserve who, having been raised by his sovereign from the lowest to the highest station, slights that sovereign’s favour?” “Death, if he slight a favour which it becomes his sovereign to grant and him to receive; the praise of all good men, if he slight a favour that would degrade his sovereign, and dishonour him.” “You have treated your Queen with the basest ingratitude.” “I have done my duty, and if that is not consistent with the station to which a criminal partiality has advanced me, I am ready again to become the slave of the Sultana, instead of her Ameer-ool-Omrah. I courted not the distinction, and will never maintain it at the price of my virtue.” The eye of Ruzeea Begum flashed fire. “Slave!” she cried, “thy virtue is but the mask of hypocrisy. There is the cause of all thy disloyalty;” and she pointed with a quivering lip towards Bameea,--“there is the rebel who has seduced thee from thy allegiance; but there shall come a day of retribution--a day of vengeance--and remember that the revenge of monarchs is not the sudden irruption of the whirlwind, but the wide-spreading devastation of the hurricane.” Bameea shrieked as she heard this fearful denouncement, and buried her brows in her small delicate hands.