If she had to go under, she would go under fighting. If this wild chief were prepared to give her her father's life in exchange for herself, she would see that he got as little pleasure as possible out of his bargain. If he were infatuated with her as Alice and Dr. Edouard seemed to think, so much the better. All the more keenly he would feel the lashes her tongue would be able to give.
Pansy knew he spoke French, for this fact had come into the story her father had told her in years gone by.
In thinking of the cutting things she would be able to lay to her captor, Pansy tried to keep at bay the dread she felt. Since he was not there to hit at in person, she hit at him with sneers at his race to Alice.
"I don't suppose there's anywhere I can have a bath," she remarked when her tea was finished. "Cleanliness isn't one of the virtues of these Arabs."
"Dere be one," Alice assured her. "De most beautifullest one you eber saw."
Pansy agreed with her maid some minutes later when she was splashing about in its cool waters.
Alice had pointed out the place to her. In dressing-gown and slippers, Pansy had passed through the wide gallery, a lacy prison of stone it seemed to the girl, for although it gave a wide view of the desert, there was not one spot in its carved side that she could have put her hand through.
Immediately beneath lay a garden, surrounded by a high wall.
Pansy had seen many gardens, but none to equal the one before her in peace and beauty. It was a dream of roses. In the middle was a sunken pond where water-lilies floated and carp swam and gaped at her with greedy mouths when her shadow fell across them, as if expecting to be fed. Vivid green velvety turf surrounded the pond, a rarity in that arid country. There was nothing else in the garden but roses, of every shade and colour. They streamed in cascades over the high walls. They grew in banks by the pond, in trellised alleys and single bushes. The garden was a gem of cool greenness, scent and silence, and over it brooded the shadows of gigantic cypresses.
The bath-room lay beneath the stone gallery, with fretted and columned arches where more roses clung and climbed, opening directly on the scented quiet of the garden. It was a huge basin of white marble, about thirty feet across and deep enough to swim in, with a carved edge, delicate as lace.