All this she poured out parrot-like amid sobs and floods of tears, while George remained on his knees beside her, and listened as quietly as a statue. Like other open and generous natures with an element of strength in them, he could be as merciful towards the frank confession of weakness as he was hard in the face of deception. He thought Rahas had worked on her by means of her love of finery, and by dark warnings against the husband of whom she had as yet had no experience, and stifling all impulses of rage against the author of the evil, who was absent and could not now be dealt with, he at once set about arriving at a more complete knowledge of what had taken place between his young wife and the wily Oriental. Sitting on the edge of the couch he put his arms round Nouna, drew her to him, and calmed her outburst of tearful petulance with tender, yearning caresses, so fond, so warm, with such depths of almost paternal protectiveness toning down and mingling with the ardent passion of the lover, that her fitful nature was soothed in a very few moments, and her arms made instinctively for his neck again as a baby turns to its mother’s breast, and the tears dried on her cheeks as she began to smile up confidingly into his face. “Now, little wife, tell me,” he whispered, looking down into her eyes with the steady fire of a man’s noblest, strongest love, before which a woman’s weak fears and suspicions could not but melt and wither, “do you believe I want to make your life unhappy? Do you think I shall be hard and cruel to you, and deprive you of anything that can please you? Look up, look up, and tell me if you think so!” She looked up, transformed by the love-touch, the love-speech, into a little spirit of fire and light, burning into his heart and flesh with an irresistible, intoxicating strength of feverish, though fitful passion. As her lips pressed his, as her fingers glided with slow, voluptuous touch till they ruffled his curly hair and clasped each other behind his head, he forgot his intention, forgot his suspicious fears, enthralled by the bliss of possession of the first woman he had ever loved and longed for. It was not until the passion-fire began to fade in Nouna’s eyes, and she slid languidly down from his neck, and drawing his arms about her so as to support her best in the position she chose, nestled against him with closing eyes, while a long sigh of perfect and complete happiness rose to her parted lips, seemed to quiver along her form, and then died slowly away, that his doubts and fears surged up again in the midst of his own intoxication of pleasure, and, with difficulty steadying himself to the task, he framed a form of words in which to resume his interrogatory. “Listen, Nouna,” he said, with an inevitable touch of hardness in his effort at self-control; “I want you to tell me all that happened after you drove off with Mr. Angelo from the church-door to-day.”