“I shall never love anybody!”
A statement which, at least subconsciously, she withdrew three days later, when walking through the Bazaar of the Goldsmiths, followed by a retinue of servants and eunuchs, her little face more disclosed than hidden by the diaphanous veil that covered her features from the soft curve of her chin to the tip of her nose, her lithe young body robed in the mysteriously feminine folds of a rose-red sari embroidered with tiny seed pearls, she saw a lean, hawkish, black-eyed stranger standing there, dressed in the costume of a rich Persian gentleman; evidently a sightseer, a traveler, for he was watching the shifting crowd interestedly.
He saw her and stared—frankly, rudely stared. But Aziza Nurmahal smiled, with all the shrewd demureness of her girlhood and with all the ancient wisdom of her sex, as she heard Mahsud Hakki, the head eunuch, make grumbling complaint that these were Persian manners, the manners of bad Moslems, of swine-fed heretics and similar base-born cattle, to ogle women in the bazaars and market-places.
That night, pledging her to secrecy by the gift of a handful of gold coins and half-a-dozen silk saris, she instructed Kumar Zaida, a pert little Tajik slave girl whose love affairs were the scandal of the whole palace, to make the rounds of the caravanserais and to find out the name of the Persian stranger:
“A lean man, with high cheek bones, an aquiline, nose, clean-shaven, dressed in a scarlet silk khalat, a white Persian lamb cap on his head. He carries his
