She was also afraid to go out, afraid of meeting people who might ask questions or of encountering those in authority who would demand who they were and where they came from.

It was Hamid who bought not only all the food for the household but also the clothes she needed, having escaped with nothing but what she wore at the time.

Anyway the elegant and expensive gowns she had worn in the warmth of the summer months at Balaclava could not have kept out the cold of the winter and might have betrayed her when she wished to appear unobtrusive and insignificant.

Hamid bought her cheap clothes, which were unfashionable but warm, yet even so Yamina could not help endowing them with a grace that made everything she wore become a part of herself.

Her father grew worse, but they did not dare to send for a physician.

Yamina nursed him as best she could while regretting that she had not studied medicine instead of the many literary subjects that interested both her and her father.

“I am sure the Master will be better when the warmer weather comes,” she said to Hamid not once but a thousand times.

And it seemed to her that when the spring sunshine came through the narrow windows there was a little more colour in her father’s cheeks.

Ill though he was, he was still handsome. He had always, Yamina thought, been one of the best-looking men at the Court of St. Petersburg, where handsome men abounded.

Now his hair and his beard had turned white and his eyes were deep-set beneath his high cheekbones. She thought sometimes when he was asleep that he looked as if he was sculpted in marble.

‘Almost as if he lay upon a tomb.’

The thought came to her and like a child she cried out at the agony of it, knowing that to lose her father would be to lose everything in life that remained to her.

Thinking of him now she left the kitchen, which occupied the whole lower half of the house and walked up the narrow rickety staircase to the upper floor.

The place was sparsely furnished and except for the rugs on the floor, which Hamid had bought in the Bazaar, there were no luxuries of any sort.

Very quietly Yamina opened the door of her father’s room.

He lay on a low divan type of bed piled high with pillows so that he could sit upright at night in order to get his breath. Through the windows he could look out over the City below them towards the Bosporus and beyond it to the green hills and mountains.

He was still asleep, Yamina thought, as she entered the room and she moved very softly over the rugs to set down a glass of lime juice by the bedside.