CHAPTER XXI
All the following day Rayma waited for the Sultan's coming. Pansy waited, also. By now she realised more fully what she had done: struck and infuriated the man who held her father's life in his hand.
However, nothing was seen of the Sultan either that day or the next.
For Pansy the days were the longest she had ever spent in her life.
She could not doze away her time as the other girls did, with coffee and sherbet and cigarettes; their greatest exertion a bath, or making sweetmeats over a charcoal brazier, or doing intricate embroidery. She kept out of their way as much as possible, in her own room, or wandering aimlessly in the garden, looking at walls impossible for her to scale, wondering what had happened to her father and her friends, and what would happen to herself. But even the garden was barred to her except in the very early morning, and the brief space after sunset. If she tried to go at other times there were twenty women to stop her. The order was the Sultan's, she was told, lest to escape him she should wander in the tropic heat and make herself ill.
All her meals had to be taken in the harem, and for bathing there was only the harem bathroom. That was a vast underground tank, approached by marble steps, cool and still and dim, its silence only broken by the dip of water.
There the girls disported themselves several times a day. But Pansy was not used to company when she bathed.
And to avoid them, she rose very early, when she was sure of having the great marble tank to herself.
During the afternoon of the third day the Sultan came.