I kissed her lips and her hair.
At home, I drew the sofa near the fire--it has been a raw night and she feels the cold like a tropical plant--and sat down by her side.
"Did you hear what I said to Hamdi Effendi--that you were my wife ?" "But that was only a lie," she answered in her plain idiom.
My petting and soothing together with the sense of home security and a cup of French chocolate prepared by Antoinette, who, astonished at our early return and seeing her darling in distress, had hastened to provide culinary consolation, had restored her wonted serenity of demeanour.
Polyphemus also purred reassuringly upon her lap.
"It was a lie this evening," said I, "but in a few days I hope it will be true." "You are going to marry me ?" she asked, suddenly sitting erect and looking at me rather bewildered.
"If you will have me, Carlotta." "I will do what Seer Marcous tells me," she answered.

"Will you marry me to-morrow ?" "I think it hardly possible, my dear," I answered.

"But I shall lose no time, I assure you.

Once you are my wife neither Hamdi Effendi nor the Sultan of Turkey can claim you.

No one can take an Englishman's wife away from him." "Hamdi is a devil," said Carlotta.
"We can laugh at him," said I.
"Did you ever see such an ugly mug ?" Where she gets her occasional bits of slang from I do not know; but her little foreign staccato pronunciation gives them unusual quaintness.