“You have seen my brother;” she said, “and I need not tell you that he is delicate and sickly. He was my mother’s last child, and the Pasha feared that he should be left without a son. In this dilemma, he expressed to the Buyuk Hanoum his desire to contract a second marriage; but this she would by no means permit. She could not, however, avoid seeing that his anxiety was but too well founded: and she accordingly proposed a compromise, to which he at once agreed. Without loss of time, he wrote to a friend in Constantinople to purchase for him four young Circassians, and to embark them, under the charge of an elderly woman, for Albania. “Young as I was, I shall not attempt to describe to you my mortification on their arrival. I saw the tears of my mother, which, when alone with me, she did not attempt to suppress; we had hitherto had but one heart and one interest in the harem of my father, and we became suddenly domesticated with strangers—women of another land and another language; to whom we were knit by no ties, bound by no sympathies. “But all this is idle. You saw the Odalique who sat nearest to my mother? Allah has been gracious to her—she has borne two sons to the Pasha.—She with the large dark eyes, who when you entered was nursing her infant, has no other child than that one little girl. A third you will shortly see, when she pays me her visit previously to retiring for the night: I love her much, but she, poor thing! is childless. The fourth died in consequence of her sufferings during the passage to Albania, which was tempestuous and protracted. The aged woman who received you on your arrival was the person who accompanied the four Circassians from Constantinople, and—but here is Dilaram Hanoum.” As she spoke, the curtain that shaded the door was pushed aside, and the Odalique entered. She was by far the prettiest woman of the three, but there was a subdued and hopeless expression about her, which showed at once that she had not been a favourite child of fortune. She was slight and beautifully formed, with a low, soft voice which was almost music. She appeared much attached to the lovely Heyminè, and hastened, after the first salutations were over, to replenish the pipe that rested beside the young beauty, and to hand it to her; a mark of attention and respect which was acknowledged by its object with the graceful salutation common in the East—the pressure of the fingers of the right hand to the lips and brow.