‘She will get to Cairo and find her father by hook or by crook,’ he thought to himself, ‘and in defiance of anyone who might try to stop her. She is certainly brave even if she is foolhardy.’
He picked up a book that he was reading, but found it difficult to follow the pages.
His eyes kept wandering towards Shikara and he felt that she was very lovely with a beauty that, when she was not talking or being defiant, had something spiritual about it.
Perhaps it was in the delicacy of her features or in the shape of her face.
He admired her winged eyebrows on either side of a small, straight nose and he wondered who her mother had been, feeling that such features and her high-instepped little feet could only have come through some aristocratic lineage.
He also wondered what his friends wou
