ether. My father
know very well now we shall be finded out, it is the end for us. He not
have fear for what we do if some person shall watch to see I not kill
myself."

"What has become of poor Embarka?" Sanda asked.

Ourieda shook her head, unutterable sadness in her eyes. "I think never
shall I know that in this world."

Ill, without feigning, as the girl was, the wedding was to be hurried
on. The original idea had been for the week of wedding festivities to
begin on the girl's seventeenth birthday; but now Ben Raana said that,
in promising his daughter the delay she asked for, he had always
intended to begin the week before and give the bride to the bridegroom
on the anniversary of her birth.

Ourieda no longer pleaded. She had given up hope, and resigned herself
with the deadly calmness of resignation which only women of the
Mussulman faith can feel. It was clear that her will was not as Allah's
will. And women came not on earth for happiness. It was not sure that
they even had souls.

"Allah has appointed that I marry my cousin Tahar," she said to Sanda,
"and I shall marry him, because I have not another stiletto nor any
poison, and I am always watched so that, even if I had the courage, I
could not throw myself down from the roof. But afterward--I am not sure
yet what I shall do. All I know is that I shall never be a wife to
Tahar. Something will happen to one of us. It may be to me, or it may
be to him. But something _must_ happen."

The Agha himself had caused to be built at Djazerta a _hammam_ copied in
miniature after a fine Moorish bath in Algiers, at which he bathed when
he went north to attend the governor's yearly ball. All Arab brides of
high rank or low must go through great ceremonies of the bath in the
week of the wedding feast, and no exception could be made in Ourieda's
case. The privacy of the _hammam_ was secured for the Agha's daughter by
hiring it for a day, and no one was to be admitted to the women's part
of the bath except the few ladies who had enough social importance to
expect invitations. That Lella Mabrouka and Sanda would be there was a
matter of course; and, besides them, there were the wives and daughters
of two or three sheikhs and caids, all of whom Sanda already knew by
sight, as they had paid ceremonious visits to the great man's harem
since her arrival at Djazerta.

The Agha had a carriage, large, old-fashioned, and musty-smelling, but
lined with gold-stamped crimson silk