he beginning of the marriage feast. We shall have a whole
week of rejoicing. Think of the horror of it for me! I had a year of
hope when he made the promise. Now I have less than six months. And in
all that time nothing has happened."

Sanda saw by the girl's look and guessed by the quiver of her voice that
she was not speaking vaguely. There was something in particular which
she had been praying for, counting upon from day to day. And that thing
had not happened.

CHAPTER XV

THE SECRET LINK

The Hand of Fatma was gone from the sky. Ruby had turned to amethyst,
amethyst to the gray-blue of star sapphire, and the red fire of the
dunes had burned out to an ashen pallor. The change had come suddenly
while the girls talked; and when Sanda realized it, she shivered a
little, with a touch of superstition she had learned from her two Irish
aunts. All this cold whiteness after the jewelled blaze of colour was
like the death of youth and hope. She pushed the thought away hastily,
telling herself it had come only because Ourieda had threatened to put
an end to her own life rather than marry Tahar; yet it would not go far
away. Like a vaguely visible, ghostly shape it seemed to stand behind
the Arab girl as she talked on, telling the story of her childhood and a
love that had grown with her growth.

There was another cousin, it appeared, the son of her mother's sister.
He was all Spanish. There was not a drop of Arab blood in his veins,
unless it came through Saracen ancestors in the days when Moorish kings
reigned over Andalusia.

"You know, now you've been with us even these few days," Ourieda said,
"that the harem of an Arab Caid isn't a nest of wives, as people in
Europe who have never seen one suppose! My father has laughed when he
told me Christians believed that. Now, Aunt Mabrouka and I and our
servants are the only women in my father's harem; but when I was a
little girl, before my mother died--I can just remember her--besides my
mother herself there was her sister, whose Spanish husband had been
drowned at sea. An Arab man thinks it a disgrace if any women related
even distantly to him or his wife are thrown on the world to make their
own living. It could never happen with an Arab woman if she were
respectable. And even though my mother's sister was Spanish and a
Christian, my father offered her and her boy a home. Already his own
sister, Aunt Mabrouka, had come to stay with us, and had brought her son
T