luctance towards
matrimony.

As if this marriage were not the best thing for her! As if it were a
hardship! To make sad eyes and draw a mouth because one is to be the
wife of a rich general.... Irrational ... The little sweetmeat was
irritating.

To this point Tewfick's buoyancy had brought him, and all the more
hastily because of his eagerness to escape the pangs of that
uncomfortable self-reproach. To Aimee, in her new clear-sightedness
of misery, it was bitterly apparent that he was reconciled with her
lot and careless of it.

So blinded had been her young affection that it was a hard
awakening, and she was too young, too cruelly involved, to feel for
his easy humors that amused tolerance of larger acquaintance with
human nature. She had grown swiftly bitter and resentful, and deeply
cold.

And now this letter. It dazed her, like a flame of lightning before
her eyes, and then, like lightning, it lit up the world with
terrifying luridity. Fiery colored, unfamiliar, her life trembled
about her.

Truth or lies? Custom and habit stirred incredulously to reject the
supposition. The romance, the adventure of youth, dared its swift
acceptance. How could she know? Intuitively she shrank from any
question to the pasha, realizing the folly and futility of exposing
her suspicion. If he needed to lie, lie he would--and in her
understanding of that, she read her own acceptance of the
possibility of his needing to lie.

Madame de Coulevain? Madame had never known her mother. Only old
Miriam had known her mother and Miriam was the pasha's slave. But
the old woman was unsuspecting now, and full of disarming comfort in
this marriage of her wild darling.

Through dinner she planned the careless-seeming questions. And then
in her negligee, as the old nurse brushed out her hair for the
night, "Dadi," said the girl, in a faint voice, "am I truly like my
mother?" and when Miriam had finished her fond protestation that
they were as like as two roses, as two white roses, bloom and bud,
she launched that little cunning phrase on which she had spent such
eager hoping.

"And was I like her when I was little--when first she came to my
father?"

"Eh--yes. Always thou wast the tiny image which Allah--Glory to his
Name!--had made of her," came the nurse's assurance.

"I am glad," said Aimee, in a trembling voice.

She dared not press that more. Confronted with her unconscious
admission the old woman would destroy it, feigning som