The time was up. I would have stabbed you if you had tried to
prevent me!"

Now he spoke at last and gave her a first glimpse of an angle of
his mind she had not suspected.

"Princess," he said. He used the word with the deference some men
can combine with effrontery, so that very tenderness has barbs.
"You might have had that thing back if you had sent a messenger
for it at any time. A word by a servant would have been enough.

"You could never have reached Khinjan then!" she retorted. Her
eyes flashed again, but his did not waver.

"Princess," he said, "why speak of what you don't know?"

He thought she would strike like a snake, but she smiled at him
instead. And when Yasmini has smiled on a man he has never been
just the same man afterward. He knows more, for one thing. He
has had a lesson in one of the finer arts.

"I will speak of what I do know," she said. "No, there is no need.
Look! Look!"

She pointed at the bed--at the man on the bed--fingers locked in
those of a woman who looked so like herself.

"You see--yet you do not see! Men are blind! Men look into a mirror,
and see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before. Women
look once and then remember! Look again!"