"Would you see me ruined?" he said passionately.
Sharply he glanced about the room, at the far, closed doors where it was not inconceivable that old Miriam was lurking, and strode over to her and began talking very jerkily and huskily, over her bent head.
"I tell you that Hamdi is making this a condition—it is the price of silence, of those papers back.... He came to me to-night. I knew that hound of Satan had been smelling about, but I could not imagine—as if, between gentlemen—"
At that, she lifted her stupefied head.... Her father, with the face of a cornered fox!... She caught her breath with the shock of it. Her lips parted, but only her mute eyes asked their startled questions.
Hurriedly, shamefacedly, with angry resentments and self-justifications, he was pouring a flood of broken phrases at her. She caught unintelligible references to narrow laws and the imbecile English, to impositions binding only upon the fools.... And then the word hasheesh.
Sharply then the truth took its outlines. Her father had been smuggling in hasheesh. Hamdi Bey had discovered this, and Hamdi Bey, unless silenced, had threatened betrayal.
The danger was real. English laws were stringent. Vaguely the horrors loomed—arrest, trial.... Even if he escaped the scandal was ruin....
Small wonder that her father had come flying upon the wings of his danger and its deliverance, small wonder that his brow was wet and his lips dry and his eyes hard with terror.
Thrown to the winds now his pretense of affection for Hamdi Bey! He hated and feared him. The old fox had done this, he declared, to get a hold upon him, for always there had been bad blood.
And the bey had heard, of course, of the beauty of the pasha's daughter. Some cousin had babbled.... And undoubtedly the rumor of that beauty—Tewfick Pasha received his inspiration upon the moment, but that was not gainsaying its truth—had determined the bey to find some vulnerable hold.