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Then the favorite slave and the faithful caique-ji the one who found the little cove even on the darkest night put their heads together two very cunning and wise heads, one black and wrinkled and the other sun-tanned and yellow with the result that one night a new odalisque, a dark-skinned, black-haired houri, the exact opposite of the fair-skinned, fair-haired Yuleima, joined the coterie in the harem of the palace of the prince.
Months had passed since that night in the arbor. Yuleima had cried her eyes out, and Mahmoud had shaken his fists and belabored his head, swearing by the beard of the Prophet that come what might Yuleima should be his.
"But what has he got to do with it? What did you say her name was? Yuleima?" "Yes, Yuleima. What has Serim to do with her? Well, I tell you. If she get away off go Serim's head. Listen! I speak something you never hear anywhere 'cept in Turk-man's land. I know it all everything. I know her prince he knows me.
They supposed, they pleaded, that she had thrown herself into the Bosphorus at the loss of her lover. Then followed the bundling up of Yuleima in the still watches of the night; her bestowal at the bottom of a caique, her transfer to Stamboul, and her incarceration in charge of an attendant in a deserted house belonging to the mosque.
She could never speak to any one and no one could speak to her even the priests knew this but a gate opening into the high-walled garden was left unlocked now and then by one of the kind-hearted Mohammedans, and often she would wander as far as the end of the wall overlooking the Mosque of Suleiman, her attendant always with her a black woman appointed by Chief-of-Police Selim, and responsible for her safety, and who would pay forfeit with her head if Yuleima escaped.
If, after searching every nook and cranny, he failed to find her, he would return and carry out his sovereign's commands and marry the princess a woman he had never laid his eyes on and who might be as ugly as sin and as misshapen as Yuleima was beautiful. All this time the heartbroken girl, rudely awakened from her dream of bliss, was a prisoner in the deserted house next the mosque.
Then came the great scene of the third act always the place for it, so dramatists say. The dark-skinned houri sprang up, rose to her full height, her eyes blazing, and facing her tormentor, cried: "You blackguard" a true statement "do you know who I am?" "Yes, perfectly; you are Yuleima, the daughter of the Bagdad merchant."
Yuleima would be his, unsullied in his own eyes and the world's, or she should remain in the little white house on the brown hill and continue to blur her beautiful eyes with the tears of her grief.
"Yuleima," began Joe, "is one womans like no other womans in all " But I shall not attempt the dragoman's halting, broken jargon interspersed with Italian and German words it will grate on you as it grated on me.
Then came the death of the paternal potentate, and the young lover was free free to come and go, to love, to hate; free to follow the carriage of his imperial master in his race up the hill after the ceremony of the Selamlik; free to choose any number of Yuleimas for his solace; free to do whatever pleased him except to make the beautiful Yuleima his spouse. This the High-Mightinesses forbade.
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