She stopped short at a sound from the far end of the hall and raised her head. Yussuf, blind, scarred, terrible to behold, stared back at her from the shadows of the door, challenging her proud statement with his empty orbits, repudiating her words without a sound or movement.
“ ... save for Yussuf the Blind,” she concluded slowly, as she raged inwardly at the man’s temerity, “whom I must needs take to my heart in obedience to my father’s dying wish.”
She gave no outward sign of the rage which swept her as she finished speaking, but she looked round for someone upon whom to vent her wrath and found him in Al-Asad, who leant against the wall, watching her from out the corner of his eyes.
“Thou!” she said, her voice cutting across the silence like a whip. “Whyfore standest thou when others kneel?”
“The lion does not flee before the gazelle!” replied Al-Asad, who had loved her from the first moment he had seen her.
Zarah made a little motion of her hand which brought the men to their feet, then beckoned Al-Asad, who walked slowly towards her and into the trap she had set for him. She had more than one weapon in her armoury and more than one form of punishment in her mind.
That the man loved her, in his savage way, she had always known; that he had worked to succeed the dead Sheikh and thereby to force her into becoming his own woman if she wished to rule, she had guessed intuitively, and in a second of time had thought out a plan in which, through his humiliation, she could revenge herself for the insult.
She was well above medium height, but seemed small beside Al-Asad as he towered above her, mighty arms folded across his breast, looking down upon her beauty.
He was a magnificent animal, with all an animal’s instincts and a dog’s fidelity, but she feared him not a bit. She looked up at the handsome face with the almost negroid lips and into the flashing eyes and down into the heart, as childish as it was vain, and smiled and raised her hand when he made a quick step forward.
“I am footsore,” she said softly. “I have cut my sandals upon the rocky path.”