And this continued to be the state of affairs between me and her until a calamity of illness befell my uncle, which did not take long to carry him to the side of his Lord. And the last thing he uttered in the final hours of his life was to his wife, in whom he had good faith: “Death has hastened me before I could look into the affairs of this boy. So be a mother to him as I was a father, and I entrust you that he should lose nothing of me after my death except my person.” But the days of mourning had not passed before I saw faces other than the faces I knew, and gazes other than the gazes I was accustomed to, and a strange state of affairs the like of which I had never known before. Worry and despair began to creep into me, and for the first time in my life, I felt in my soul that I had become a stranger in this house and an outcast in this world.
One morning, as I was sitting in my room, the maid entered upon me. She was a virtuous and sincere woman. She approached me shyly and hesitantly and said, “My mistress has ordered me to tell you, sir, that she has decided to marry off her daughter in the near future, and she believes that your remaining by her side after her father’s death and your both reaching this age that you have reached might breed suspicion in her fiancé’s mind. She wishes to arrange a dwelling for the couple in this wing of the palace that you occupy, so she wants to move to another house that you choose for yourself from among her houses, where she will take care of all your affairs as if you had not left her.”