The tragic wolf-song wavered from hill to hill; from the Fields of the Dead to the Seven Towers, from 14 Kassim to Tophane, seeming to swell into one dreadful, endless plaint:
“My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
“And me!” muttered Ferez, shivering in the windy vapours from the Black Sea, which already dampened his face with their creeping summer chill.
“Ferez!”
He turned slowly. Swathed in a white wool bernous, Nihla stood there in the foggy moonlight.
“Why?” she enquired, without preliminaries and with the unfeigned curiosity of a child.
He did not pretend to misunderstand her in French:
“Thou knowest, Nihla. I have never touched thy heart. I could do nothing for thee——”
“Except to sell me,” she smiled, interrupting him in English, without the slightest trace of accent.
But Ferez preferred the refuge of French: