There was a new slave in the Sultan's harem, a dazed girl who looked as if she moved in dreams. She was not reclining on a lounge or cushions, as the other girls around the fountain were. She half sat, half knelt upon her cushions, her slim bare legs beneath her, her hands lying listlessly on her knee, staring straight ahead as if in a trance.
Since that episode on the tennis court, Pansy felt as if she were living in the midst of some wild story, in which Raoul Le Breton and the Sultan Casim Ammeh had got mixed.
The Sultan wanted to marry her. And she had refused.
Then——!
Then, infuriated with the sense of her own helplessness and his complete power, she had struck him.
She could see him now, with the blood oozing on his lips, his face white with rage, his eyes flaming, looking as if he could kill her. And she had wished he would. Then there would have been an end of it all. She would have done with him, herself, her own folly, and the hatred that raged like a fire within her.
But he had not touched her.
White with passion he had just stood and looked at her. And she had looked back, waiting for the end that had not come.
Instead, three women had come. And she had been taken out of his presence. Through the big salon and along dim passages, past silk-clad, jewelled guards, and into a little room, with an ottoman and cushions and a tiny window, all fretted like lace, impossible to get out of.
Then the women had undressed her. They were three to one. It was useless to struggle: dignity seemed all that was left to her.