Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/241

 talk here and there, believed that the Afghan had come as a messenger from Hajji Akhbar Khan, Itizad el-Dowleh, returned from the far places who, it seemed, was awaiting the princess in the mausoleum of the late Ameer, by the banks of the Ghulan River.

“Allah!” Ayesha Zemzem had exclaimed. “A clumsy trap! There is nothing near that part of the river banks except desolation! A trap fit for idiots and unthinking children! And, dost thou mean to say, Kumar Zaida, that thou …?”

“Who was I to argue?” the slave girl had defended herself. “The princess ordered me to be silent. The Afghan, too, said it was important that nobody knew about the message or the going. Maybe”—bold and arrogant since she knew that she would get a beating whatever happened—“maybe they did not trust thee, old woman …”

But her last words had been swallowed in the nurse's furious, high-pitched demand:

“Why didst thou not come to me, fool? Why didst thou not tell me, O daughter of a mangy and very unbeautiful she-pig?”

Flopp!—her bony old hand descended on the girl's bare shoulder; and then came the scene which so boisterously interrupted the prosy business discussion between Hector Wade and Mr. Ezra Warburton, the former dashing off at a thundering gallop, and Ayesha Zemzem raging through the palace like a miniature whirlwind of fury … fury suddenly scotched, as she entered the princess' apartment and, looking about her, discovered that the ancient, straight-bladed sword