strict accordance with Oriental ideas; the floors were covered with the richest carpets Turkey could produce; the walls hung with brocaded silk of the most magnificent designs and texture; while around each chamber luxurious divans were placed, with piles of soft and yielding cushions, that needed only to be arranged at the pleasure or convenience of such as sought repose.
Haydée had three French maids, and one who was a Greek.
The first three remained constantly in a small waiting-room, ready to obey the summons of a small golden bell, or to receive the orders of the Romaic slave, who knew just enough French to be able to transmit her mistress’s wishes to the three other waiting-women; the latter had received most peremptory instructions from Monte Cristo to treat Haydée with all the deference they would observe to a queen.
The young girl herself generally passed her time in the chamber at the farther end of her apartments.
This was a sort of boudoir, circular, and lighted only from the roof, which consisted of rose-colored glass.
Haydée was reclining upon soft downy cushions, covered with blue satin spotted with silver; her head, supported by one of her exquisitely moulded arms, rested on the divan immediately behind her, while the other was employed in adjusting to her lips the coral tube of a rich narghile, through whose flexible pipe she drew the smoke fragrant by its passage through perfumed water.
Her attitude, though perfectly natural for an Eastern woman would, in a European, have been deemed too full of coquettish straining after effect.
Her dress, which was that of the women of Epirus, consisted of a pair of white satin trousers, embroidered with pink roses, displaying feet so