But Jill, lifting her arms, laid her hands in utter submission upon the man's breast, and sighed again in perfect content beneath the kisses which covered them, and her arms and her breasts and her beautiful mouth.
"As thou wilt," she whispered softly, "only as thou wilt."
And verily as a young tree she stood in the glory of her youth with her feet upon the sands of Egypt, and verily was her heart glad when she was carried into the inner chamber, and passed into the keeping of her master for ever.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Some months had gone, and the sun sparkled on the water of the little singing stream, though bitter winds had blown and all-enveloping sand had swirled about the palms which surrounded Jill's beautiful home in the oasis, of which the reins were gradually slipping into fingers skilled in driving anything from a four-in-hand to a donkey in a cart.
Three mornings a week, an hour after dawn, she gave audience to all those who, with grievance or in difficulty, desired her help or advice; for which ceremony, and having the dramatic instinct, she had caused a clearing to be made in the shade of the palms, under the biggest of which she had also had placed a great chair of snow-white marble, in which, clothed always in white, she would seat herself, her passionate mouth smiling happily behind the yashmak whilst over it the great eyes, into which had crept a look of infinite tenderness in the months that had passed, would scrutinise the people standing humbly and astounded before her.
She would look across upon mothers with obstreperous sons who would not work, or would not wed; mothers who beat their breasts in despair at the utter lack of looks or grace in the unfortunately multiplied feminine arrows within the parental quiver; young men who craved a word of recommendation so as to obtain a certain post; older men who craved an overdraft at the bank of her patience; young mothers whose infants were either too fat or too lean, or with eyes half-eaten away with disease; all of whom having received a full measure of help, pressed down and running over, and having bestrewn themselves upon the ground around her chair, would depart in high fettle to spread the news of this wonder woman, their mistress, in whom they felt such inordinate pride; so that one, then two, then more, from distances long and short, would creep into the council with pretexts ranging from the thin to the absolutely transparent, until one morning the whole séance ended in an unseemly fracas between the legitimate and the illegitimate seekers after help in word or kind, whereupon Hahmed, rising in his wrath, smote them verbally hip and thigh, and Jill departed in high dudgeon, leaving the culprits to wilt in the frost of her keen displeasure.
And from about that date, a month ago, everything seemed to have gone wrong.
Days of depression would follow days of mad spirits, hours when she was as the sweetest scented rose within the hands of the Arab, followed by interminable, stretches of time when the points of the "wait-a-bit" thorn were blunt compared to the exceeding sharpness of her temper.
Days when all that was right was wrong, and all that was wrong was wrong, so that her women crept quietly, and Hahmed wondered sometimes if some "afreet"[1] haunted the soil and had taken possession of the soul of his beloved.