Khalid spoke, as Olga thought, half in jest and half in earnest, so she continued in the same mocking tone in which she had first spoken—
“Then if that is so, if all human enmities are soon to be purged by the all-destroying fires, we may as well meet in peace for the moment. Will your Majesty honour me by presenting me to your uninvited guests?”
“Uninvited, but still my guests, Tsarina,” replied Khalid gravely, “and therefore I need not ask you”—
“No, Sultan,” said Olga, interrupting him, “you need ask me nothing. You need not fear that I shall not respect the hospitality of your house, even when extended to them.”
As she spoke she gave him her hand again and he led her between the silent, rigid ranks of his guards to where Alan and Alma were standing.
Since men and women had learned to love and hate there had been no such strange meeting between two women as that which now took place between Alma and Olga. It was the first time that Olga had ever seen a woman of the race to which Alan belonged, and Alma, for the first time confronted with a daughter of the “earth-folk,” saw in Olga Romanoff at once the most beautiful woman outside the confines of Aeria and the incarnation of everything that she had been trained to look upon as evil.
While the Sultan was speaking the words of presentation their eyes met, and Alma thought of that sentence in Alan’s letter to his father, “She is as beautiful as an angel and as merciless as a fiend,” while Olga looked back to the time when she first heard Alma’s name and hated her for the sake of him who now stood beside her, her lover and her husband—the man she had held in bondage for years without winning one voluntary caress from him.
Alma’s first emotion was one of wonder. Hitherto, she had seen nothing beautiful that was not at the same time good, for in Aeria the conceptions of beauty and goodness were inseparable. But here was a woman of almost perfect physical loveliness, after her own type, who was beyond all doubt guilty of the most colossal crime that a human soul had conceived or a human hand had carried out since men first learned to sin.
The world, which ten years before had been a paradise of peace, prosperity, and enlightened progress, was now a wilderness of misery and an inferno of strife, fast lapsing back into barbarism—and all this was her doing.
As this thought came to Alma’s mind, standing out distinct among all the others that were forcing themselves upon her, wonder gave place to unspeakable horror, and as Olga approached, with the light of hate still burning in her eyes and the same mocking smile upon her lips, she instinctively shrank back as though to avoid contact with some unclean thing. As she did so her hand slipped through Alan’s arm and a visible shudder ran through her form.