She quivered from head to foot; but her courage would not yield, her faith would not be turned.
"Need a man hate the dust under his foot?" she muttered in her teeth; "because it is a thing too lowly for him to think of as he walks."
"You are very truthful."
She was silent; standing there in the shadow of the great mill-timbers.
The old man watched her with calm approving eyes, as he might have watched a statue of bronze. He was a great man, a man of much wealth, of wide power, of boundless self-indulgence, of a keen serene wisdom, which made his passions docile and ministers to his pleasure, and never allowed them any mastery over himself. He was studying the shape of her limbs, the hues of her skin, the lofty slender stature of her, and the cloud of her hair that was like the golden gleaming mane of a young desert mare.
"All these in Paris," he was thinking. "Just as she is, with just the same bare feet and limbs, the same untrammeled gait, the same flash of scarlet round her loins, only to the linen tunic a hem of gold, and on the breast a flame of opals. Paris would say that even I had never in my many years done better. The poor barbarian! she sells her little brazen sequins, and thinks them her only treasure, whilst she has all that! Is Arslàn blind, or is he only tired?"
But he spake none of his thoughts aloud. He was too wary to scare the prey he meant to secure with any screams of the sped arrow, or any sight of the curled lasso.
"Well," he said, simply, "I understand; your eagle, in recompense for your endeavors to set him free, only tears your heart with his talons? It is the way of eagles. He has wounded you sorely. And the wound will bleed many a day."
She lifted her head.
"Have I complained?—have I asked your pity, or any man's?"