This over, breakfast was placed before her, and exhausted nature forced her to partake of the food with a better appetite.
“I shall need my strength,” she said to herself; and she ate and drank, but started at every movement outside the room as she waited the coming of those who would set her free.
“Hilton, in spite of what has passed, will not rest until he has found me—poor fellow!”
She said these last two words with a mingling of contempt and pity in her voice; though had he presented himself then, she would have thrown herself gladly in his arms.
But there was no token of approaching relief. The voices of many women could be heard coming and going about what was apparently a large native house; and the prisoner could not avoid a shudder as from time to time she thought of who must be the owner of the place.
The morning was giving way to the heats of noon, and languid and heart-sick Helen was lying back upon one of the couches, thinking of the happy days of the past, and trying to piece together the broken, incoherent facts connected with her seizure, and wondering whether Murad were the real cause, when the two Malay girls who had left her for a few moments returned, bearing a handful of wreaths of a beautiful fresh white jasmine, which they insisted upon placing in her thick, dark hair.
Helen resisted this trifling for a time, but despair had tamed her spirit; and after a few feeble attempts to stay her persecutors, she sat like a statue, asking herself, with her eyes fixed upon the gay sarong she wore, whether this was the Helen of the past—and what was to be the end.
The two girls placed the lovely white flowers in her hair, laughing with delight, and clapping their hands as they drew back to gaze at their work; after which one of them went off to fetch a common hand-glass of European make, and held it before her face that she might, as they said, “see how beautiful they had made her now.”
Helen was too sick of heart and weary to do more than cast a cursory glance at the glass; but this was followed by another, and then she uttered an anguished cry, shrinking back and cowering down as if with dread as she covered her face with her hands.
Fair Helen was fair no longer. Her face was as swarthy as that of the darkest Malay.