than usual.  By her side alone he forgot his cares and disappointments; by her side alone his eye met a smile, and his heart a gleam of gayety.  When the elders of Avar discussed in a circle the affairs of their mountain politics, or gave their judgment on right or wrong; when, surrounded by his household, he related stories of past forays, or planned fresh expeditions, she would fly to him like a swallow, bringing hope and spring into his soul.  Fortunate was the culprit during whose trial the Khana came to her father!  The lifted dagger was arrested in the air; and not seldom would the Khan, when looking upon her, defer projects of danger and blood, lest he should be parted from his darling daughter.  Every thing was permitted, every thing was accessible, to her.  To refuse her any thing never entered into the mind of the Khan; and suspicion of any thing unworthy her sex and rank, was as far from his thoughts as from his daughter’s heart.  But who among those who surrounded the Khan, could have inspired her with tender feelings?  To bend her thoughts—­to lower her sentiments to any man inferior to her in birth, would have been an unheard-of disgrace in the daughter of the humblest retainer; how much more, then, in the child of a khan, imbued from her very cradle with the pride of ancestry!—­this pride, like a sheet of ice, separating her heart from the society of those she saw.  As yet no guest of her father had ever been of equal birth to hers; at least, her heart had never asked the question.  It is probable, that her age—­of careless, passionless youth—­was the cause of this; perhaps the hour of love had already struck, and the heart of the inexperienced girl was fluttering in her bosom.  She was hurrying to clasp her father in her embrace, when she had beheld a handsome youth falling like a corpse at her feet.  Her first feeling was terror; but when her father related how and wherefore Ammalat was his guest, when the village doctor declared that his wound was not dangerous, a tender sympathy for the stranger filled her whole being.  All night there flitted before her the blood-stained guest, and she met the morning-beam, for the first time, less rosy than itself.  For the first time she had recourse to artifice:  in order to look on the stranger, she entered his room as though to salute her father, and afterwards she slipped in there at mid-day.  An unaccountable, resistless curiosity impelled her to gaze on Ammalat.  Never, in her childhood, had she so eagerly longed for a plaything; never, at her present age, had she so vehemently wished for a new dress or a glittering ornament, as she desired to meet the eye of the guest; and when at length, in the evening, she encountered his languid, yet expressive gaze, she could not remove her look from the black eyes of Ammalat, which were intently fixed on her.  They seemed to say—­“Hide not thyself; star of my soul!” as they drank health and consolation from her glances.  She knew not what was passing within her; she could not