His eye caught someone, a slip of a child it looked, wrapped close in a creamy veil sitting beside a fountain. Some coolie's daughter, no doubt, waiting for her father to finish work.
"Here, hold these birds, child," he cried peremptorily. The figure did not move and with another curse on its stupidity he strode up to it, thrust the pigeons into its lap and with a brief order to hold them fast till his return, strode off again. Something he must settle, he felt, before he met his father in the Audience of Nobility.
Vague, instinctive affection and loyalty had to war with passionate desires for power, with the thousand and one poisoned thoughts which, day and night, were put into his mind diligently by those who sought him as their tool.
When he had disappeared into the thickets of pomegranate and orange, there came a sudden little laugh.
"Oh! birdies! birdies! What a stupid stripling!"
The shrouding veil which she had hastily drawn round her on the appearance of the Prince, slipped back, and Mihr-un-nissa's dimpling face was buried in the opalescent feathers of her captives. "Nay! no struggling! Sure thou art better here than with your sulky, fatling Prince--though see you, my birds, he is not so ill-looking when he is seen close, as the squirrel said of the spider when he had dismembered him! But he is not a patch on Sher Afkân. La! how Ummu squirmed when I spoke of him. What sillies women be, as if one might not use one's eyes. Ohí! Now I have it! 'Tis the talisman in his turban gives the Prince his air. Have a care! Mihr-un-nissa, lest thou fall in love with him and desert true friend. And yet----"
She paused, looked down at her own face mirrored in the water and what she saw there held her.
It was true what the woman told her. That was no mere wife's face--it was the face of a queen--a real queen----
The birds of love fluttered in her listless hold. Lost in her dreams she scarcely noticed that one, eluding her slack grasp fled joyfully to coo his pæan of liberty from an orange tree hard by.
Was it worth it? Was it worth it? What was all the power in the world worth to a woman, as she--the girl upon its verge--imagined womanhood?