not know the condition of a rising doctor and the pocket of a rising doctor... So he forswore beauty and loveliness, and cursed the hour of rashness and haste that had bound him to this creature. And he cursed his hand when he found it powerless to stuff her mouth with what she craved, so as to buy her silence and her satisfaction.
The cup overflowed at last when she announced to him that she would not live beneath one roof that sheltered both her and his sister, and that she would never accept for herself second or third rank in this house. It appalled him that she should slap the hand stretched out to her in love and welcome, and it galled him that she should be so lavish with her taunts; and so he chose divorce — and separation.
And so it was.
But the troubles did not end with her going, nor were they uprooted by her departure; she left behind her a whirlwind... a whirlwind in the depths of Sameh and of Ayda alike.
And oh, the gaping thrust the two of them received in the very core, when Sameh got a letter from Mukhtar saying that Mona had smitten him with love and infatuation, and that he found in himself every inclination to marry her, now that she had become free, bound to no creature by any tie...
He closes his letter with many excuses, poured into a thousand molds and one...
Oh, the horror of what Ayda heard, and oh, her disappointment in Mukhtar — had he fallen into the snares of beauty as the bird falls, he whom she had known to be averse to tinsel and colors, thinking with reason and not with feeling? Had Mona, and not she, been the object of all that attention he had lately shown?
How did she not notice, when she was all eyes and ears?... Truly, how great her blindness was!...
Ah, curse the fates — how harsh and unjust their decrees! Would that he had never wakened in her a hope that had died, or all but died... never courted her again with smiling wishes, never made her covet a place in the processions of happiness...
Mukhtar, Mukhtar! O setting hope,
O joy uncompleted, carried off by the raven of ill omen... And Ayda folds the fourth page of the book of life with trembling fingers, and suddenly raises her hands to stop her ears against it, that there may not reach her hearing the whistle bursting from the nearby station, resounding, overwhelming, cruel, as though it insisted on reminding her that the train of life has passed her by... twice...
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