"But of course he would have shut her up—with another wife, perhaps."
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Stephen. "The poor child has never thought of that possibility. She says he promised her sister he would never look at any other woman."
"Ah, the promise of an Arab in love! Perhaps she did not know the Arabs—that sister. It is only the men of princely families who take but one wife. And he would not tell her if he had already looked at another woman. He would be sure, no matter how much in love a Christian girl might be, she would not marry a man who already had a wife."
"We might find out that," suggested Stephen.
"It would be difficult," said the Frenchwoman. "I can try, among Arabs I know, but though they like to chat with Europeans, they will not answer questions. They resent that we should ask them, though they are polite. As for you, if you ask men, French or Arab, you will learn nothing. The French would not know. The Arabs, if they did, would not tell. They must not talk of each other's wives, even among themselves, much less to outsiders. You can ask an Arab about anything else in the world, but not his wife. That is the last insult."
"What a country!" Stephen ejaculated.
"I don't know that it has many more faults than others," said Nevill, defending it, "only they're different."
"But about the scandal that drove Ben Halim away?" Stephen ventured on.
"Strange things were whispered at the time, I remember, because Ben Halim was a handsome man and well known. One looked twice at him in his uniform when he went by on a splendid horse. I believe he had been to Paris before the scandal. What he did afterwards no one can say. But I could not tell Mees Ray what I had heard of that scandal any more than I would tell a young girl that almost all Europeans who become harem women are converted to the religion of Islam, and that very likely the sister wasn't Ben Halim's first wife."
"Can you tell us of the scandal, or—would you rather not talk of the subject?" Stephen hesitated.