One thing she had learned in her sojourn amongst the whites, which, for a time, was to enable her to establish herself as a very ruler of uncivilized men.
She had learnt the rudiments of self-control.
Where she had leapt blindly under the lash of her ungovernable temper, she now waited, giving her crafty brain time to work; where she had once stormed and raved, she now shrugged her shoulders and smiled with a “I will give you my answer later. I must have time to think.”
Admired for her beauty, envied for her brilliance, liked for the seemingly generous way in which she flung money to beggars and gifts to all and sundry, yet she had failed to take Helen Raynor’s place in the hearts of those who had known her, so that she cherished an incredible hatred for the girl who had done her no harm whatever.
She stood on the verandah this morning, an hour before breakfast, waiting for her syce to bring her mare, staring across the grounds towards the Midan where guests of the Hotel Savoy also waited for their horses; stared without seeing them or Fate crouching under the cactus hedge which separated the school grounds from the Midan.
She was almost at the zenith of her beauty, which, in the East, buds, blossoms, and fades almost in the passing of an hour; she was infinitely good to look upon, as thought the gardener who had gazed upon her the first night of her arrival, as he peered in admiration at her from behind a clump of shrubs this day—her last in the school if she had but known it.
She wore satin trousers so voluminous that they hung like a skirt when she did not move; a full short-sleeved chiffon vest under a black velvet bolero, sandals on her feet, a scarlet belt about her slim waist and an orange-coloured flower in her rebellious curls.
As she stood waiting, she idly compared the men who had come as suitors for her hand to her mountain home just over two years ago, with the European men she had met in her short excursions into the world under the wing of a schoolmate’s mother, stationed in Cairo.
She smiled and shrugged her shoulders and reached for a pomegranate into which, knowing herself to be alone, she drove her teeth in none too dainty a manner.