Tempered by politeness, and by that respect and deference to a female which have come down to us from the days of the Crusaders and the Cavaliers, the manner of a European lover is so different from the bearing of an Oriental one, that there can be little wonder if the heart of a Mahommedan woman is easily won by the stiff-hatted, tight-coated, and long-trousered denizen of that ample and mysterious district known to her only as Frangistan. In the matter of love and wedlock, the Turkish woman has as little idea of freedom as the Turk has of the arguments advanced by S. Bufford, gent.—a certain learned pundit, who, in the reign of King William III., wrote an Essay 'against persons marrying without their own consent.'
'Oh, that I had the right to love you, as I have the right to hate the Yuze Bashi Hussein!' said Iola, after one of her long silences. 'Oh the odious! May the heel of my slipper be ever on his mouth—and yet—and yet he is my husband!'
'I wince always at that word in your pretty mouth, Iola!'
'In loving you, I cease to love him—-if indeed I ever loved him. Allah did not create woman with two hearts—with one under each breast, as the Moolah Moustapha affirms.'
'But our love is full of sadness as well as peril, Iola—for a day is coming when I must leave you.'
'Oh, leave me not!' she exclaimed, passionately. 'Must my love be sacrificed to this coarse and untutored Osmanli? The day after you leave me I shall have ceased to live.'
'Leave you I must, Iola.'
'Why?—when?'
'When ordered—for I, too, have Yuze Bashis and Mir Alais and Pashas who command me.'
'By the love with which you have inspired me!' she said in a piercing whisper, with her black eyes flashing in brilliance through their tears; 'I conjure you to take me with you, for I cannot live without you, and without you I must die!'