and
spring into his soul. Fortunate was the culprit during whose trial
the Khana came to her father! The lifted dagger was arrested in the
air; and not seldom would the Khan, when looking upon her, defer
projects of danger and blood, lest he should be parted from his
darling daughter. Every thing was permitted, every thing was
accessible, to her. To refuse her any thing never entered into the
mind of the Khan; and suspicion of any thing unworthy her sex and
rank, was as far from his thoughts as from his daughter's heart. But
who among those who surrounded the Khan, could have inspired her
with tender feelings? To bend her thoughts--to lower her sentiments
to any man inferior to her in birth, would have been an unheard-of
disgrace in the daughter of the humblest retainer; how much more,
then, in the child of a khan, imbued from her very cradle with the
pride of ancestry!--this pride, like a sheet of ice, separating her
heart from the society of those she saw. As yet no guest of her
father had ever been of equal birth to hers; at least, her heart had
never asked the question. It is probable, that her age--of careless,
passionless youth--was the cause of this; perhaps the hour of love
had already struck, and the heart of the inexperienced girl was
fluttering in her bosom. She was hurrying to clasp her father in her
embrace, when she had beheld a handsome youth falling like a corpse
at her feet. Her first feeling was terror; but when her father
related how and wherefore Ammalat was his guest, when the village
doctor declared that his wound was not dangerous, a tender sympathy
for the stranger filled her whole being. All night there flitted
before her the blood-stained guest, and she met the morning-beam, for
the first time, less rosy than itself. For the first time she had
recourse to artifice: in order to look on the stranger, she entered
his room as though to salute her father, and afterwards she slipped in
there at mid-day. An unaccountable, resistless curiosity impelled her
to gaze on Ammalat. Never, in her childhood, had she so eagerly longed
for a plaything; never, at her present age, had she so vehemently wished
for a new dress or a glittering ornament, as she desired to meet the eye
of the guest; and when at length, in the evening, she encountered his
languid, yet expressive gaze, she could not remove her look from the
black eyes of Ammalat, which were intently fixed on her. They seemed
to say--"Hide not thyself; s