‘I will not awaken him,’ she decided. ‘Hamid is right – sleep is better medicine than anything I can bring him and as he has slept so well perhaps the fever will have passed.’

Having set the jug and glass down on the table without making a sound, she stood looking down at her father, his straight aristocratic nose, the square brow from which his white hair swept back, his closed eyes and his hands which lay outside the white sheet, relaxed and still.

Yamina was suddenly tense.

Very slowly, as if she forced herself almost against her will, she put out one of her own hands to touch his and, as her fingers felt the cold of his skin, she knew that what she had feared was true.

With a little cry she fell on her knees.

For a moment she could not weep, she could feel nothing except a sudden cessation of living, as if everything had come to an end.

A long time later when her eyes had dwelt on his face and she had faced the fact that his spirit had left him and she was alone, she cried out,

“Papa! Papa! How can I manage without you? Oh, my darling father. I shall miss you so desperately!”

She could hear her own voice as it were in a vacuum. Then, as if someone told her that she must not pray for herself but for her father, she began to say the prayers for the dead.

She had not heard them since her mother’s funeral and yet they had remained in her mind so that she could repeat them almost word-perfect.

Only when they were finished and the last ‘Amen’ had left her lips did the tears come and she bent forward to bury her face against the sheets that covered her father.

*

It was a long time later when Yamina went downstairs.

Hamid was waiting for her.

“The Master is dead, Hamid!” she said.

Her voice was steady. There were no longer any tears in her eyes.

“May Allah carry him to Paradise, Mistress.”

“He is safe, Hamid. Perhaps that matters more than anything else,” Yamina said. “I was afraid after what we saw today.”

“I know, Mistress, and I thought when I came back that perhaps the Master had left us, but I was not sure.”

“Supposing that should have – happened to – him!” Yamina whispered, remembering the spy in the Bazaar.

Then trembling at the thought she said hastily,

“We must be practical, Hamid. If I am discovered, you must not be involved!”

“I will not desert you, Mistress.”

“I must leave Constantinople,” Yamina said, “but where can I go?’“

“I have been thinking, Mistress, for a long time, that this might happen,” Hamid said. “I have a suggestion, but you might be angry with me.”