"How strange! Yes, I felt it. Something made me look. Why did you will me, Antoun Effendi?" Monny's voice was soft. But it was not like a child's now. It was a woman's voice.
Listening with tingling ears, I knew what she wanted him to answer. Perhaps he also knew, but he boldly told the truth. "It was a kind of wager I made with myself. There was some troublesome business I had to carry out in Cairo. A good deal hung upon it. I saw your profile. You didn't turn my way, and I said to myself: 'If by willing I can make that girl look at me, I'll take it for a sign that I shall succeed in my work.'"
"Oh! It was nothing to do with me?"
"Not then. Afterward I knew that, while I thought my own free will suggested my influencing you, it was destiny that influenced me. Kismet! It had to happen so. But you punished me for my presumption. You treated me as if I were a slave, a Thing that hardly had a place in your world."
"I know! That's what I've asked you to forgive me for."
"And because you've asked me to forgive, I'm telling you this. I was furious; and I said, 'She shall be sorry. I will make her sorry.' My whole wish was to humble you. I wanted to conquer, and though you classed me with servants, to be your master."
"I don't blame you, Antoun Effendi! And you have conquered, in a better way than you meant when you were angry and hating me. You've conquered by showing your true self. You are my friend. That's what you want, isn't it?—Not to be my master, when you don't hate me any longer."
"No, that is not what I want. I still want to be your master."
"Then you do hate me, even now?"
"No, I don't hate you, Mademoiselle Gilder, although you've punished me over and over again for being the brute I was at first. You have conquered me, not I you. But I don't want to be your friend. If you didn't look at me as being a man beyond the pale, you would understand very well what I want."