ied
apartments wholly unconnected with those of the count. The rooms had
been fitted up in strict accordance with Oriental ideas; the floors were
covered with the richest carpets Turkey could produce; the walls hung
with brocaded silk of the most magnificent designs and texture; while
around each chamber luxurious divans were placed, with piles of soft and
yielding cushions, that needed only to be arranged at the pleasure or
convenience of such as sought repose. Haidee and three French maids,
and one who was a Greek. The first three remained constantly in a small
waiting-room, ready to obey the summons of a small golden bell, or to
receive the orders of the Romaic slave, who knew just enough French
to be able to transmit her mistress's wishes to the three other
waiting-women; the latter had received most peremptory instructions from
Monte Cristo to treat Haidee with all the deference they would observe
to a queen.

The young girl herself generally passed her time in the chamber at the
farther end of her apartments. This was a sort of boudoir, circular,
and lighted only from the roof, which consisted of rose-colored glass.
Haidee was reclining upon soft downy cushions, covered with blue satin
spotted with silver; her head, supported by one of her exquisitely
moulded arms, rested on the divan immediately behind her, while the
other was employed in adjusting to her lips the coral tube of a rich
narghile, through whose flexible pipe she drew the smoke fragrant by its
passage through perfumed water. Her attitude, though perfectly natural
for an Eastern woman would, in a European, have been deemed too full
of coquettish straining after effect. Her dress, which was that of
the women of Epirus, consisted of a pair of white satin trousers,
embroidered with pink roses, displaying feet so exquisitely formed and
so delicately fair, that they might well have been taken for Parian
marble, had not the eye been undeceived by their movements as they
constantly shifted in and out of a pair of little slippers with upturned
toes, beautifully ornamented with gold and pearls. She wore a blue and
white-striped vest, with long open sleeves, trimmed with silver loops
and buttons of pearls, and a sort of bodice, which, closing only from
the centre to the waist, exhibited the whole of the ivory throat and
upper part of the bosom; it was fastened with three magnificent diamond
clasps. The junction of the bodice and drawers was entirely concealed