All these things seemed ridiculously unimportant when Yamina remembered how much they had spent in the past in their magnificent house with over one hundred servants to wait on them and another hundred in the gardens outside.

But what money they had with them when they escaped had been in Russian currency and it had been difficult to change it.

Hamid had managed to do so only by pretending that he had stolen it on the battlefield or obtained it in the past when trading with a people who were not the enemy.

Naturally he did not fetch a good rate of exchange and Yamina had often wondered how long it would be before the real enemy of which they must be afraid was starvation.

Now she had to face facts.

It would be impossible for her and Hamid to try to reach some other country without money.

It would be equally impossible for them to return to Russia.

She had thought once or twice that perhaps, if her father died, she would be able to get back to Russia and find her way to St. Petersburg. But she knew now that it would be impossible without a considerable sum of money to bribe a boatman to carry her across the Black Sea.

But to enter a harem!

Every instinct in her body shrank from the idea.

“You will be safe, Mistress,” Hamid said as if he knew where her thoughts were taking her, “and Sahin says that later they will somehow get you away. It is not as difficult as it was when the Sultan lived in the Seraglio. Now he is at the Dolmabahçe Palace, which is on the shore of the Bosporus. Perhaps one night there could be a boat. Mihri is clever and she has great power.”

“But the – harem!” Yamina murmured.

“Sahin say Mihri will pretend you her sister.”

Yamina rose to her feet and walked across the kitchen to stand at the open window.

Outside the sunshine was still brilliant on the flat roofs of the white houses, but the afternoon was drawing to a close. Soon night would fall – the soft velvet night of the Levant with great stars shining like diamonds in the sky.

There would be lights too on the Bosporus, the lights of the steamships moving into the Black Sea, carrying more men to fight against the Russians who were still holding out at Sebastopol.

Soldiers, who sooner or later, Yamina thought clairvoyantly, would pierce the defences so that Sebastopol would fall and the Russians be humiliated.

Then at last there would be peace but until then she was in danger – deadly danger.

When the house-to-house search began, she would be discovered. She had no papers, nothing to prove her identity and she was quite certain that confronted with a Frenchman, the subterfuge she had used on Lord Castleford would be ineffective.