Followed a strangely dramatic scene.
Zarah, daughter of the desert, gifted with the Eastern’s prophetic powers, rose slowly to her feet, gripping the back of her chair with one hand as she pointed at the English girl with the other.
“I do not know who you are, English girl,” she said in French, “nor whence you came or where you go, but our paths have crossed at the place appointed by Fate, and they will cross and recross, and you will hold what I desire, and I will wrest it from you.” Her great eyes, the colour of the desert sand, opened wide as she leant forward in the shuttered room, staring far beyond Helen Raynor and far beyond the room and the garden wall outside, into the future. She spoke quietly, as though to herself, and the girls and Jane Cruikshanks, who stood unnoticed in the doorway, shivered slightly as they listened. “I know not what I have to learn from you unless it is pain, English girl; I know not what it is that you hold and I desire, for behold! I see myself upon the topmost peak of a high mountain and you as dust beneath my feet. And I see steps, and coming up the steps one who turns his face from me to you so that I see naught but a scar upon his forehead. I can see no more. I—I——”
She backed from the table and stood against the wall, unconsciously dramatic under the power of the gift of prophecy, which had come to her with her father’s blood, then turned and left the room.
Jane Cruikshanks, who had never been known to miss an opportunity, immediately stepped forward and poured the cold water of common sense and reasoning upon the conflagration of immature romance which flared in the twenty young hearts around the dining-room table: explained and suggested things, until the girls declared themselves as only too willing to co-operate in the task of civilizing the new arrival.
“Sometimes love has been planted by one glance alone.”—Arabic Proverb.
It proved no easy matter.
Stifled in the narrow confines of the best bedroom, Zarah smashed the windows on the first night and plumped her mattress on the verandah, and, waking at dawn, as was her custom in her mountain home, sprang at the gardener, who gazed enraptured upon the sleeping beauty, causing him to fall backwards down the steps and twist an ankle; upon which disaster, and in an effort to stop his vociferous lamentations, she dashed into her bedroom, and, through the broken window, flung a bag of gold at him, which, catching him in the chest, caused him to forget the hurt to his ankle and to fall upon his knees with his face turned towards Mecca in thanksgiving for the unexpected stroke of good fortune.
Undisciplined, uncontrolled, miserable through want of occupation and interest in those about her, she simply refused to work or to obey in any way, until silver streaks appeared in Amelia Cruikshanks’ mousey, scanty hair.