She dared not press that more. Confronted with her unconscious admission the old woman would destroy it, feigning some evasion. But there it was, for as much as it was worth....
Presently then, she found another question to slip into the old woman's narrative of the pasha's grief.
"Eh, to hear a man weep," Miriam was murmuring. "Her beauty had set its spell upon him, and—"
"And he lost her so soon. Three or four years only, was it not," ventured Aimée, "that they had of life together?"
It seemed that Miriam's brush missed a stroke.
"Years I forget," the nurse muttered, "but tears I remember," and she began to talk of other things.
But it seemed to Aimée that she had answered. As for that other matter, of the dead Delcassé child, she dared not refer to it, lest Miriam tell the pasha. But how many times, she remembered, had she been told that she was her mother's only one!
Yet, oh, to know, to hear all the story, to learn Ryder's discovery of it! It was all as strange and startling as a tale of Djinns. And the life that it held out to her, the enchanted hope of freedom, of aid—Oh, not again would she refuse his aid!
She had no plans, no purposes. But that night over her hastily-donned frock she slipped the black street mantle and when at last, after endless waiting, the murmuring old palace was safely still and dark, she stole down the spiral stair and gained the garden. And then, a phantom among its shadows, she fled to the rose bushes by the gate.
Breathlessly she knelt and dug into the hiding place of that gate's key. To the furthest corner her fingers explored the hole, pushing furiously against the earth. And then she drew back her hand and crushed it against her face to check the nervous sobs.