Taking his twitching face between her hands, she showed him her eyes filled with tears.
"But I do understand," she protested.
If she did, it was because she also was alone.
That night, as she was going to her own room, she saw Hamoud in the upper corridor. Something forlorn and lost in his exotic aspect struck through her sadness: she remembered how far from home this exile was, how far removed also from the rank to which he had been born. She hesitated, then asked remorsefully:
"Do you hate me, Hamoud?"
He turned pale, standing before her with the wall light shining upon his face of a young caliph.
"I, madam?"
"Well, for what I've got you into: this service, which must distress you every day. But what was there to do? It offered itself when I—you, too, I suppose—could think of nothing else."
Hamoud-bin-Said, paler than ever, replied in Arabic:
"You are sorry for me because I have lost my heshma, my prestige? It is part of the divine wisdom, the foreordained plan of my life. All things happen for the best. The house is warm, so that one does not feel the winter. There is food, so that one does not starve. Therefore, my body is at peace——" He paused to compress his carnelian lips, before concluding serenely, "And as for my soul, it rests as always in the palm of God, like a bird waiting to be taught its ways."