“No, but you were! It doesn’t matter anyway. Work hard and you’ll marry her, my father told me at the time; make sure you turn out to be a young man who is worthy of her and I’ll see you’re married! I asked what degree of worthiness was required, and my father replied that Ali Bey Sulaiman was his relative and close friend but we needed Susan Hanem’s approval. She was rich and not concerned with wealth; what she wanted for her daughter was a successful young man—a judge, for example. The fact of the matter is that my own rapid promotion has impressed a number of people. I’ve become an important civil servant—no, politician even—at a very early age. But no one knew what the real reasons were for this unusual energy on my part!”

With a graceful gesture, she opened an ivory fan. On its outer edge was a picture of a swimming duck. “All this, and yet you hadn’t been to see me for ten years!” she said with mild irony.

“Don’t forget,” he said earnestly, “that your father was appointed a justice after that, that he worked for years plying between Asyut and Alexandria, and that I myself got heavily involved in politics.”

“How were you to know that ten years hadn’t turned me into something awful?” she asked with a coquettish smile.

“My heart! I trust its feelings. And when I saw you again my confidence in it was doubled. So our betrothal may seem traditional on the surface, but there’s a real love story behind it even though it was all one-sided.”

“Well, at any rate,” she murmured, gazing into the distance, “it’s not that way any longer.”

He took her chin between his fingers, turned her head gently, leaned forward until his hungry mouth met her soft lips in a throbbing kiss, then drew his head back again, smiling with a sense of happiness so deep that as his eyes wandered over the collection of flowerpots on the veranda, they were misted with emotion like a fog-covered windowpane. The tale he’d told her was not a complete fabrication. Not all along the line, in any case. He had often admired her beauty in the past and he really loved her now, even if he’d forgotten her for ten years. So what harm was there in a little white lie, which was a shining example of good sense and which would give their relationship a magical beauty of its own?