The kiosque looked very dark and unfamiliar as the Pasha entered it. He wondered what had become of Hélène--if by any chance he had passed her on the way. He wanted her. She was the expression of what the evening roused in him. He heard nothing, however, but the splash of water from a half-visible fountain. It reminded him for an instant of the other fountain, below, and of Shaban. His steps resounded hollowly on the marble pavement as he walked into the dim old saloon, shaped like a T, with the crossbar longer than the leg. It was still light enough for him to make out the glimmer of windows on three sides and the square of the fountain in the centre, but the painted domes above were lost in shadow.
The spaces on either side of the bay by which he entered, completing the rectangle of the kiosque, were filled by two little rooms opening into the cross of the T. He went into the left-hand one, where Hélène usually sat--because there were no lattices. The room was empty. The place seemed so strange and still in the twilight that a sort of apprehension began to grow in him, and he half wished he had brought up Shaban. He turned back to the second, the latticed room--the harem, as they called it. Curiously enough it was Hélène who would never let him Europeanise it, in spite of the lattices. Every now and then he found out that she liked some Turkish things better than he did. As soon as he opened the door he saw her sitting on the divan opposite. He knew her profile against the checkered pallor of the lattice. But she neither moved nor greeted him. It was Zümbül Agha who did so, startling him by suddenly rising beside the door and saying in his high voice:
The Pasha had forgotten about Zümbül Agha; and it seemed strange to him that Hélène continued to sit silent and motionless on her sofa.
"Good evening," he said at last. "You are sitting very quietly here in the dark. Are there no lights in this place?"
It was again Zümbül Agha who spoke, turning one question by another:
"No," replied the Pasha shortly. "He said he had a message, but I told him not to come."
"A-ah!" ejaculated the eunuch in his high drawl. "But it does not matter--with the two of us."
The Pasha grew more and more puzzled, for this was not the scene he had imagined to himself as he came up through the part in response to his wife's message. Nor did he grow less puzzled when the eunuch turned to her and said in another tone: