He paused for a moment, watching her tenderly.
"Yet you paid me the greatest compliment I ever had in my life. When you said you loved me. There could be no sweeter music that those words. And the choicest gift life has ever given me was a kiss from your lips, given willingly."
He bent his head.
"Won't you give me another, Pansy?"
But the girl's strained face was turned away from the proud, passionate one so close to her own.
"No, my little flower? Will you make a thief of your Sultan? Will you give him nothing willingly now? I know I don't deserve it. But still—I want it. And my wants have been my only law so far."
Again he paused, stroking her curls with a loving hand.
"Just now, as man and woman together, Pansy, I know I don't deserve you. I know I'm not worthy of you. But I want my soul, although I've only a blackened body to offer it. And the soul will have to do the best it can with the grimy accommodation. For I must have you, my darling. You've taken everything out of my life, but a desire for you."
From a tangle of trees in an adjacent garden a nightingale burst into song, filling the night with liquid melody. At the sound the Sultan's arms tightened around the slender figure he held.
"No man appreciates virtue so much as the one who has had his fill of vice," he continued presently. "And I was born into it, steeped and sodden in it from my earliest recollection, until I didn't realise it was vice until I met you. And then it seemed to me I had run off the lines, and pretty badly."