"Mrs. Ray died when I was fourteen, and after that Mr. Potter lost everything in speculation," the girl answered.
"Everything of yours, too?"
"Yes. But it didn't matter, except for the delay. My dancing—your dancing really, dearest, because if it hadn't been for you I shouldn't have put my heart into it so—earned me all I needed."
"I said you were extraordinary! But how queer it seems to hear those names again. Mrs. Ray. Mr. Potter. They're like names in a dream. How wretched I used to think myself, with Mrs. Ray in Paris, when she was so jealous and cross! But a thousand times since, I've wished myself back in those days. I was happy, really. I was free. Life was all before me."
"Dearest! But surely you weren't miserable from the very first, with—with Cassim?"
"No-o. I suppose I wasn't. I was in love with him. It seemed very interesting to be the wife of such a man. Even when I found that he meant to make me lead the life of an Arab woman, shut up and veiled, I liked him too well to mind much. He put it in such a romantic way, telling me how he worshipped me, how mad with jealousy he was even to think of other men seeing my face, and falling in love with it. He thought every one must fall in love! All girls like men to be jealous—till they find out how sordid jealousy can be. And I was so young—a child. I felt as if I were living in a wonderful Eastern poem. Cassim used to give me the most gorgeous presents, and our house in Algiers was beautiful. My garden was a dream—and how he made love to me in it! Besides, I was allowed to go out, veiled. It was rather fun being veiled—in those days, I thought so. It made me feel mysterious, as if life were a masquerade ball. And the Arab women Cassim let me know—a very few, wives and sisters of his friends—envied me immensely. I loved that—I was so silly. And they flattered me, asking about my life in Europe. I was like a fairy princess among them, until—one day—a woman told me a thing about Cassim. She told me because she was spiteful and wanted to make me miserable, of course, for I found out afterwards she'd been expressly forbidden to speak, on account of my 'prejudices'—they'd all been forbidden. I wouldn't believe at first,—but it was true—the others couldn't deny it. And to prove what she said, the woman took me to see the boy, who was with his grandmother—an aunt of Maïeddine's, dead now."
"The boy?"
"Oh, I forgot. I haven't explained. The thing she told was, that Cassim had a wife living when he married me."
"Saidee!—how horrible! How horrible!"
"Yes, it was horrible. It broke my heart." Saidee was tingling with excitement now. Her stiff, miserable restraint was gone in the feverish satisfaction of speaking out those things which for years had corroded her mind, like verdigris. She had never been able to talk to anyone in this way, and her only relief had been in putting her thoughts on paper. Some of the books in her locked cupboard she had given to a friend, the writer of to-day's letter, because she had seen him only for a few minutes at a time, and had been able to say very little, on the one occasion when they had spoken a few words to each other. She had wanted him to know what a martyrdom her life had been. Involuntarily she talked to her sister, now, as she would have talked to him, and his face rose clearly before her eyes, more clearly almost than Victoria's, which her own shadow darkened, and screened from the light of the moon as they stood together, clasped in one another's arms.