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She thanked the givers charmingly, though in a manner so subdued and with a face so grave that the visitors would have been astonished had not Lella Mabrouka explained that she had been ill with an attack of fever. From hot room to hotter room the women trooped, resting, when they felt inclined, upon mattings spread on marble, while the bride, the queen of the occasion, was given a divan.
Perhaps the Arab girl had been cleverly "working up" to this moment, so that the suggestion, made instantly after the death of the simoon, might seem natural to her aunt. In any case it was as Ourïeda had hoped. Lella Mabrouka did not follow the girls. When they came out on the flat white expanse of roof, Sanda gave a cry of surprised admiration.
She recalled the night when she had been afraid of the storm, and he had sat by her through the long hours. Somehow, she did not know why, it helped a little to remember that. Ben Râana, graver and sterner than she had seen him, was waiting in the early dawn which struck out bleak lights from the dangling prisms of the big French chandeliers the ugly chandeliers of which Lella Mabrouka was proud.
Aunt Mabrouka had not stopped to reflect when she had made that threat, or else she had hoped to part them, and to make Ourïeda believe Sanda had gone. "You see," the girl explained in her halting English, "they my father and my aunt shall have too much of the fear to let you go till after all is finished." "Finished?" "When the marrying has been over thou canst go. Then it too late.
Then for the first time Sanda realized that Ourïeda, the soul of the picture, was not the only human figure in it besides herself. Lella Mabrouka was a personality, too, and if she had been a woman of some progressive country, marching with the times, most probably she would have been among the Suffragists.
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