other.

There was no sound in the next room, and when Saidee was weary of her
strained position, she crossed the floor on tiptoe again, to shut the
door. But she could not resist a temptation to peep in.

It was as she had expected. Victoria had left the inlaid cedar-wood
shutters wide open, and through the lattice of old wrought-iron,
moonlight streamed. The room was bright with a silvery twilight, like a
mysterious dawn; but because the bed-linen and the embroidered silk
coverlet were white, the pale radiance focused round the girl, who lay
asleep in a halo of moonbeams.

"She looks like an angel," Saidee thought, and with a curious mingling
of reluctance and eagerness, moved softly toward the bed, her little
velvet slippers from Tunis making no sound on the thick rugs.

Very well the older woman remembered an engaging trick of the child's, a
way of sleeping with her cheek in her hand, and her hair spread out like
a golden coverlet for the pillow. Just so she was lying now; and in the
moonlight her face was a child's face, the face of the dear, little,
loving child of ten years ago. Like this Victoria had lain when her
sister crept into their bedroom in the Paris flat, the night before the
wedding, and Saidee had waked her by crying on her eyelids. Cassim's
unhappy wife recalled the clean, sweet, warm smell of the child's hair
when she had buried her face in it that last night together. It had
smelled like grape-leaves in the hot sun.

"If you don't come back to me, I'll follow you all across the world,"
the little girl had said. Now, she had kept her promise. Here she
was--and the sister to whom she had come, after a thousand sacrifices,
was wishing her back again at the other end of the world, was planning
to get rid of her.

Suddenly, it was as if the beating of Saidee's heart broke a tight band
of ice which had compressed it. A fountain of tears sprang from her
eyes. She fell on her knees beside the bed, crying bitterly.

"Childie, childie, comfort me, forgive me!" she sobbed.

Victoria woke instantly. She opened her eyes, and Saidee's wet face was
close to hers. The girl said not a word, but wrapped her arms round her
sister, drawing the bowed head on to her breast, and then she crooned
lovingly over it, with little foolish mumblings, as she used to do in
Paris when Mrs. Ray's unkindness had made Saidee cry.

"Can you forgive me?" the woman faltered, between sobs.

"Darling, as if there were anything