The man spoke curtly as he sank upon a pile of cushions and pointed to one on the far side of the Persian rug, upon which the most courted woman in Egypt knelt, with her eyes full of gentleness and her heart pounding in a torment of rage and fear.
"Yea, I understand."
Hugh Carden Ali spoke wearily, being stricken with love. For ten solid minutes the woman had talked round her subject. Intuitive, she scented danger; usually fearless, her whole being was sick with apprehension; desperate, she dug her nails into her flesh and essayed to reach her goal by a roundabout way.
Then she stopped, sighed, and cast down her eyes; then raised them beseechingly when the man spoke.
"Fearing to use force against the—the woman who thou sayest is loved by the man thou lovest—and may the prophet bear witness that thy tale is as full of turnings and twistings as the paths in the bazaar in which thou spinn'st thy web—thou would'st tear her from him by craft. Explain thy seemingly futile words, and hasten thy lying tongue, for behold the hour of dawn approacheth."
And the wrath in the voice was such as to hurl the woman pell-mell over the cliff of discretion down into the depths of her own undoing.
"She, the white woman, walks in the bazaar, yea, even at noon and at sunset. Perchance one evening, lured by the tale of the riches of the house of Zulannah, might not her feet stray within the portals at the setting of the sun. And behold, the key of the great door is within these hands, and—and———"
The man's hands lay quietly on his knees as he leant forward, and the shadow thrown by the flowering plants hid the twin pools of murder in the depths of his eyes.
"And———?" he whispered.
"And———" she whispered back, "would the white man, thinkest thou, take to wife her who had passed a night in the house of the courtesan? Would he not, without waiting for explanation, throw her into the filth of the bazaar, leaving her for the first comer to pick up, and turn himself to———"