On seeing it, his eyes glittered covetously.
Without a word he took the diamond.
Pansy passed down the dim passage. She hardly knew how her feet took her along its ill-lit length. Every moment she expected to meet someone, or that one of the several doors leading into it would open, and her flight be brought to an abrupt end.
However, unchallenged she reached the iron gates.
A lamp flickering in a niche close by, showed her that one of the doors was slightly ajar. With shaking hands she pulled it further open and slipped out.
Outside all was silence and whiteness. Like a sea, the desert stretched away to a milky horizon. In a luminous vault the moon hung, a great round molten mass, that filled the world with a shimmer of silver.
Finding herself really beyond the palace precincts, took all strength from the girl. Hardly daring to breathe, she crept a few steps further, and leant against the city wall, to recover a little and get her bearings. Then, furtive as a shadow, she made her way towards a long, low building that showed up like a huge ebony block in the whiteness.
There were others as furtive as Pansy prowling round the city walls; jackals searching for offal, snarled at her as she passed along, slinking away and showing teeth that gleamed like ivory in the moonlight.
The first sound of them made her start violently, for she felt the Sultan's hand upon her, drawing her back to himself and captivity. But when she saw the prowlers were four-footed, she passed on, heedless of them, until the paddock fence was reached.
To climb over was a simple task. Then she ran swiftly across the grassy space; suddenly deadly afraid, not of the loneliness, but that the stable doors might be locked and she would not be able to carry out her project.