"But I cannot be a Turkish woman long!" she added inconsequently with a smile. "My legs are asleep. I really must walk about a little."
When he had helped her to her feet she led the way into the other room. They had their coffee and cigarettes there. Hélène walked slowly up and down the length of the room, stopping every now and then to look into the square pool of the fountain and to pat her hair.
The Pasha sat down on the long low divan that ran under the windows. He could watch her more easily now. And the detachment with which he had begun to look at her grew in spite of him into the feeling that he was looking at a stranger. After all, what did he know about her? Who was she? What had happened to her, during all the years that he had not known her, in that strange free European life which he had tried to imitate, and which at heart he secretly distrusted? What had she ever really told him, and what had he ever really divined of her? For perhaps the first time in his life he realised how little one person may know of another, and particularly a man of a woman. And he remembered Shaban again, and that phrase about his wife being safer than Hélène. Had Shaban really meant anything? Was Hélène "safe"? He acknowledged to himself at last that the question was there in his mind, waiting to be answered.
Hélène did not help him. She had been standing for some time at an odd angle to the pool, looking into it. He could see her face there, with the eyes turned away from him.
"How mysterious a reflection is!" she said. "It is so real that you can't believe it disappears for good. How often Madame Pomegranate must have looked into this pool, and yet I can't find her in it. But I feel she is really there, all the same--and who knows who else."
"They say mirrors do not flatter," the Pasha did not keep himself from rejoining, "but they are very discreet. They tell no tales!"
Hélène raised her eyes. In the little room the servants had cleared the improvised table and had packed up everything again except the candles.
"I have been up here a long time," she said, "and I am rather tired. It is a little cold, too. If you do not mind I think I will go down to the house now, with the servants. You will hardly care to go so soon, for Zümbül Agha has not finished what he has to say to you."