Hastily written letters were dispatched to all the captains and to all the rebels, informing them that Sultan Achmed had been deposed and Sultan Mahmud was reigning in his stead; let them all come, therefore, at dawn of day next morning and do homage to the new Padishah.
The moon had long been high in the heavens and was shining through the coloured windows of the Seraglio when the magnates withdrew and Mahmud remained alone.
Only the Kizlar-Aga awaited his pleasure—the Kizlar-Aga whose sooty face seemed to cast a black shadow upon itself.
Mahmud extended his hand to him with a smile that he might kiss it.
And then Elhaj Beshir conducted him to the door of those secret apartments within which bloom the flowers of bliss and rapture, and throwing it open bent low while the new Sultan passed through.
Only three among the peris of loveliness had preferred eternal loveless slavery to the favours of the new Padishah, and among those who smiled upon the young Sultan as he entered the room, the one who had the happiest, the most radiant face, was the fair Adsalis, who still remained the favourite wife, the Sultana Asseki, even after the great revolution which had turned the whole Empire upside down and made the least to be the greatest and the greatest to stand lowest of all.
Among so many smiling faces hers was the one towards which the tremulously happy and enraptured Sultan hastened full of tender infatuation; she it was whom he raised to his breast and in whose arms he soothed himself with dreams of glory, while she stifled his anxieties with her kisses.
Everything was asleep in the Halls of Felicity, only Love was still awake. Mahmud, forgetful alike of himself and his empire, pressed to his bosom his dear enchanting Sultana, the most precious of all the treasures he had won that day; but the fair Sultana shuddered from time to time in the midst of his burning embrace. It seemed to her as if someone was standing behind her back, sobbing and sighing and touching her warm bosom with his cold fingers.
Perchance she could hear the sighing and the sobbing of him who lay sleepless far, far below that bower of rapture, in one of the cold vaults of the Place of Oblivion, thinking of his lost Empire and his lost Eden!