“Nay....”
“Yea....”
Followed a heated sotto voce discussion, with interludes of gambling instigated by the Patriarch, who had grown a-weary of his new raiment, in which he found it difficult to find the dice and counters. The gambling spread right through the hall; the men were quiet, watching Zarah as she played every note in the scale of woman’s charm to enthral the man at her side, whilst he, thinking of Helen, replied mechanically to her questions.
And Helen, pale, with great shadows round her eyes, sat on her couch with her hands clasped in a desperate effort to keep herself well under control. For a week she had not been allowed outside the front of her building, nor had she seen Zarah or caught a sign of Yussuf amongst the rocks which towered around the little clearing behind.
When she had moved to the door or the windows she had met the negress, who had pushed her back, and none too gently, whilst making sounds of anger in her throat. Her food had become scanty and badly cooked; her books had been taken one by one; she had been made to understand that to bathe in the river, ride, or visit the dogs, which had learned to love her, was forbidden.
When the shouts of laughter which greeted the dwarf with his tangle of monkeys rang through the night air, she jumped from the couch and ran out into the clearing at the back, whereupon, to her everlasting undoing, the negress shifted her ungainly person into the direct centre of the doorway in the front of the building and lost herself in a great disgruntlement, whilst chewing the fragrant “kaat.”
Helen stopped dead in the middle of the clearing and pressed her hands upon her mouth.
Swinging hand over hand, dropping noiselessly from rock to rock, came Yussuf down the mountainside, with “His Eyes” upon his shoulders.
Fifteen feet above her they stood, side by side, upon a narrow ledge, then, after a few whispered words, leapt like panthers and landed like great cats upon the sand of the clearing. Noiselessly they crossed to Helen, who stood, speechless, against the wall. In the merest whisper Yussuf asked her a question and repeated the answer to “His Eyes.”
There was no sound as the youth crept to the door and peered in, nor when, with his back to the wall and his dagger between his teeth, he stole round the room, his eyes fixed on the surly negress lost in her great disgruntlement. Neither did she make other sound than a little sigh when, struck by Fate from behind, she fell forward into Eternity with her mouth full of kaat.