"Shall we wait, my Pasha?" asked the head kaikji.
The Pasha turned to Shaban, as if to put a question. And as if to answer it Shaban said:
"The Madama is up in the wood, in the kiosque. She sent down word to ask if you would go up too."
"Then don't wait." Returning the boatmen's salaam, the Pasha stepped into his garden. "Is there company in the kiosque or is Madama alone?" he inquired.
"I think no one is there—except Zümbül Agha," replied Shaban, following his master up the long central path of black and white pebbles.
"Zümbül Agha!" exclaimed the Pasha. But if it had been in his mind to say anything else he stopped instead to sniff at a rosebud. And then he asked: "Are we dining up there, do you know?"
"I don't know, my Pasha, but I will find out."
"Tell them to send up dinner anyway, Shaban. It is such an evening! And just ask Moustafa to bring me a coffee at the fountain, will you? I will rest a little before climbing that hill."
"On my head!" said the Albanian, turning off to the house.
The Pasha kept on to the end of the walk. Two big horse-chestnut trees, their candles just starting alight in the April air, stood there at the foot of a terrace, guarding a fountain that dripped in the ivied wall. A thread of water started mysteriously out of the top of a tall marble niche into a little marble basin, from which it overflowed by two flat bronze spouts into two smaller basins below. From them the water dripped back into a single basin still lower down, and so tinkled its broken way, past graceful arabesques and reliefs of fruit and flowers, into a crescent-shaped pool at the foot of the niche.