The women worked silently, humbly, though they would have
been chattering if the great Sidi stranger had not been there; but two
or three little children in orange and scarlet rags played giggling
among the rubbish outside the tent--a broken bassour-frame, or
palanquin, waiting to be mended; date boxes, baskets, and wooden plates;
old kous-kous bowls, bundles of alfa grass, chicken feathers, and an
infant goat with its mother.
The sound of children's shrill laughter, which passed unnoticed by the
parents, who had it always in their ears, rasped Maieddine's nerves, and
he would have liked to strike or kick the babies into silence. Most
Arabs worship children, even girls, and are invariably kind to them, but
to-day Maieddine hated anything that ran about disturbingly and made a
noise.
Now the Caid had reached the gate, and was talking to the men in the
motor-car. Would he send them away? No, the gate was being opened by a
servant. Ben Sliman must have invited the Roumis in. Possibly it was a
wise thing to do, yet how dangerous, how terribly dangerous, with
Victoria perhaps peeping from one of the tiny windows at the women's
corner of the house, which looked on the court! They could not see her
there, but she could see them, and if she were tired of travelling and
dancing attendance on a fidgety invalid--if she repented her promise to
keep the secret of this journey?
Maieddine's experience of women inclined him to think that they always
did forget their promises to a man the moment his back was turned.
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