The same light also gave the woman to view. Drawing a stool to
the divan, she placed the platter upon it, then knelt close
by ready to serve him. Her face was that of a woman of fifty,
dark-skinned, dark-eyed, and at the moment softened by a look
of tenderness almost maternal. A white turban covered her head,
leaving the lobes of the ear exposed, and in them the sign that
settled her condition--an orifice bored by a thick awl. She was
a slave, of Egyptian origin, to whom not even the sacred fiftieth
year could have brought freedom; nor would she have accepted it,
for the boy she was attending was her life. She had nursed him
through babyhood, tended him as a child, and could not break
the service. To her love he could never be a man.
He spoke but once during the meal.
"You remember, O my Amrah," he said, "the Messala who used to
visit me here days at a time."
"I remember him."
"He went to Rome some years ago, and is now back. I called upon
him to-day."
A shudder of disgust seized the lad.
"I knew something had happened," she said, deeply interested.
"I never liked the Messala. Tell me all."
But he fell into musing, and to her repeated inquiries only said,
"He is much changed, and I shall have nothing more to do with him."
When Amrah took the platter away, he also went out, and up from
the terrace to the roof.
The reader is presumed to know somewhat of the uses of the
house-top in the East. In the matter of customs, climate is a
lawgiver everywhere.
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