"Each time that the door In my sister's house opens My sister is displeased. I wish I were her doorkeeper, She would then be displeased with me. Each time that I heard her voice, Frightened as a child I should be." "Is that all?" Dio asked with a smile. "That's all," said Pentaur, flushing slightly as though ashamed of his song being too short. He flushed often and easily like a little boy; it was strange and almost absurd in a man of thirty, but Dio liked it. "Frightened as a child I should be," she repeated, this time without a smile. "Yes, hardly anything is said and yet all is said. With you in Egypt love is wordless, just as the sky is cloudless...." "No, we have longer songs, too, but I don't like them so well; the short ones are better." He struck the strings and sang: "I long for you more Than a starving man longs for bread, Than a sick one longs for health, Than a woman in travail for the baby's cry." The strings sobbed passionately, almost brutally, as men sob with hunger, thirst, or pain. And all of a sudden came a subtle, cunning tune: "I love truth, of flattery I scorn to think I would rather see you than eat and drink." "Love compared to eating and drinking," she said in surprise and she pondered. "How coarse--coarse and tender at the same time! But of course that is the very subtlest flattery." "Why flattery?" "Why? Ah, my dear brother, that is just what is so bitter in life, that without bread and water men die, but without love they live." "No, they die, too," he said quietly, and was going to add something, but merely gazed at her in silence and his eyes looked sadder than ever. He blushed and hastened to change the subject. "I must send the pleater to you: the feathers don't lie properly." He put out his hand to straighten the tiny pleats--'feathers'--on her sleeve. Dio took his hand; he tried to draw it away, but she kept it in hers almost by force, roughly and tenderly at the same time, looking into his eyes with a smile. He turned away and this time, instead of turning red, he turned slightly pale under his bronze-coloured skin, frightened as a child. This happened at every meeting: her charm, always new, seemed to him a miracle. Oh, this body, much too slender, the narrow hips, the angular movements, the rebellious curls of bluish-black hair cut much too short, the colour in the cheeks, dark-skinned like a boy's and girlishly tender, the colour of the rosy almond blossom in the gathering dusk, and the darkish down on the upper lip--an absurd little moustache! A girl who was like a boy. This was always so; but it was new that all of a sudden the girl did not want to be a boy. She let his hand go, blushed and spoke of something different. "It is not the pleater's fault, it is simply that I do not know how to wear these clothes--one can see at once I am not an Egyptian." "Yes, but it is not the dress--it's your face and hair."