Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/233

 at a gallop, while the old nurse looked after him, trembling, crying … and presently turned again to the slave girl.

“Why didst thou not tell me, daughter of a wart?”

“I couldn't—the princess never thought that the Hajji wasn't …”

"She has less sense even than thou! A husband—that is what she needs! A husband who beats her—but not too much—or may Allah help him!” she wound up in a disconcerting mingling of defiance and gentleness.

“What has happened?” Mr. Warburton asked Babu Chandra, who had come into the audience hall, fully as excited as the nurse had been.

“The Princess Aziza Nurmahal fell into a trap. And so—so did …”

“Who?”

“Your daughter, Heaven-Born!”

And, like the nurse, he told a jerking, hysterical tale, at the end of which the financier, even as Hector had done, rushed out of the palace, into the outer court, and mounted the first horse he saw.

And off and away, toward the eastern gate, toward the open country that rose slowly, gradually, to a far horizon of soft curves and blue vapors, slashed with silver and nicked with livid purple, while Hector was urging his stallion toward the West, where the Ghulan River laid a shining ribbon across the town's straggling suburbs, and where the turrets and bulbous domes of the dead Ameer's mausoleum swept to the sky in a stony abandon.