She did not stir. She sat fixed and tense. Then slowly the blood came back to her heart, for he was moving away from her again to his place at the table. Laughing a little, pulling at his blond mustache in a gesture of conquest, his kindling eyes glinting down at her, "You must forgive the precipitateness--of a lover," he murmured. "You do not know your own beauty. You are like a crystal in which the world has thrown no reflections. All is pure and transparent--" If she did not find words to answer him, to divert his admiration, she felt that she was lost. "You are not complimentary--a bit of glass, monsieur, instead of a diamond! But I am too weary to be exacting.... If now, you will permit me to bid you good evening and withdraw--" "Little trembler," said the general facetiously, and reached out a hand to touch her cheek, the light, reassuring caress that one might give a petted child, but it almost brought a cry of nervous terror from her lips. She thought that if he touched her again she would scream. He inspired her with a horrible fear. There was something so false, so smiling in him... he was like an ogre sitting down to a delicate dish of her young innocence, her childish terrors, her frank fears.... She could not have told why she found him so horrible, but everything in her shrank convulsively from him. And the need of courtesy to him, of propititation--! The cup was bitterer than her darkest dreams.... She wondered how many other women had drained such deadly brews... had sat in such ghastly despair, before some other bridegroom, affable, confident, masterful.... She told herself that she was overwrought, hysterical. The man was courteous. He was trying to be agreeable, to make a little expected love. He had drank a little too much--another time she might find him different. He was probably no worse than any other man of her world. It was not in her world, each young Turkish girl said in those days, that one could find love. But it was _not_ her world! It was an alien world, enforced, imprisoning.... That was the bitterest gall of all the deadly cup. "There is no need for haste," he was assuring her. "In a moment I will call your woman. Fatima, her name is, an old slave of our house." "I could wish," said Aimée, "that I had been permitted to bring my old nurse, Miriam, without whom I feel strange--" "No old nurses--I know their wiles," laughed the bey, setting down his drained cup with a wavering hand. "They are never for the husbands, those old nurses--we will have no old trot's tricks here!"