"But you have been lonely, perhaps?" he asked. "Have the roses and
doves in the garden been companions enough for you? Have you not
been too much alone?"
In the heavy load of apprehension of intangible fear and horror
that seemed stifling her, a madness of longing came over the girl
to be free from her guilty secret, to have never known Murad. Now
she could have looked up fearless, full of expectant joy! She could
have loved this man; she knew it, now that she felt his love
approaching her: hope was dying within her that ever again would he
regard her simply as his daughter. She knew those tones of the
voice, she had heard them from Murad in the garden, but here the
voice was infinitely more refined, the sound of it exquisitely
musical; and now, that love for her was in it, it told her a new
secret, that she could have given love for love. She knew, though
her eyelids were down, how beautiful the face was that bent over
her: the straight, severe lines of it, the magnificent eyes and
brows burnt through her lids. Ah, why had he waited so long, or she
not waited longer?
Full of intolerable, irrepressible pain, she looked up at last
suddenly.
"Why did not my lord come into the garden, to the roses and doves
and--me?" she asked falteringly, her gaze held now irresistibly by
the dark orbs above her.
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