The Sheik

"You didn't suppose you were the first, did you?" he asked with brutal

candour. "Don't look at me like that. They were not like you, they came

to me willingly enough--too willingly. Allah! How they bored me! I

tired of them before they tired of me."

She flung her arm across her eyes with a dry sob, straining away from

him. She had never thought of that. In the purity of her mind it had

never occurred to her. She was only one of many, one of a succession of

mistresses, taken and discarded at his whim. She writhed with the shame

that filled her. "Oh, you hurt me!" she whispered very low, and then

anger killed all other feeling. He had loosened his arm about her and

she wrenched herself free and sprang to her feet. "I hate you, do you

understand? I hate you! I hate you!"

He lit a cigarette leisurely before answering and moved into a more

comfortable position on the divan. "So you have already told me this

afternoon," he said at length coolly, "and with reiteration your remark

becomes less convincing, ma cherie."

Her anger ebbed away. She was too tired to be angry. She was humiliated

and hurt, and the man before her had it in his power to hurt her more,

but she was at his mercy and to-night she could not fight. She pushed

the hair off her forehead with a heavy sigh and looked at the Sheik's

long length stretched out on the couch, the steely strength of his

limbs patent even in the indolent attitude in which he was lying, at

his brown handsome face, inscrutable as it always was to her, and the

feeling of helplessness came back with renewed force and with it the

sense of her own pitiful weakness against his force, compelling her to

speak. "Have you never felt pity for a thing that was weaker than

yourself? Have you never spared anything or any one in all your life?

Have you nothing in your nature but cruelty? Are all Arabs hard like

you?" she said shakily. "Has love never even made you merciful?"

He glanced up at her with a harsh laugh, and shook his head. "Love?

Connais pas! Yes, I do," he added with swift mockery, "I love my

horses."

"When you don't kill them," she retorted.

"I am corrected. When I don't kill them."

There was something in his voice that made her reckless, that made her

want to hurt him. "If you give no love to the--the women whom you bring

here, do you give love to the women of your harem? You have a harem, I

suppose, somewhere?" she braved him with curling lip and scornful

voice, but as she spoke she knew that she had only hurt herself and her

voice faltered.