Often, in those long, hopeless days in the gilded prison, a similar morsel was all she had been able to eat for her tea.
Sixteen years ago a boy of about fourteen had sworn to kill her father. He would be thirty now. The same age as——! And the Sultan spoke French too!
They were little things, but they all pointed in one and the same direction. And, as Pansy brooded on them, an incredulous expression came to her eyes, and, with it, a look as if she were fighting to keep some horrible, impossible truth at bay.
Her gaze went to Le Breton.
"A great, big, fine man, awful good-looking."
Alice's description of the Sultan Casim Ammeh came back to her. Words that fitted her host exactly.
As she looked at him, from the paddock came the stamp of a horse's hoof.
She was here. Her favourite horse was here. Raoul Le Breton was here. All of them in this desert city hundreds of miles from civilisation. Such a combination could not be unless——
"If I were a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave. Or to get down to more modern times. If I were a barbaric Sultan somewhere in Africa and you a girl I'd fancied and caught and carried off..."
His own words came echoing through her head; condemning words.