So saying, she moves on quickly; and yet with the dance gone out of her feet. It never quite comes back. They look into an Arab club, where men are squatting, playing with odd-looking cards and drinking muddy coffee. Then a loud noise of jabbering young voices makes them peep in upon an Arab school, where a circle of little Moslems is sitting on the ground, scribbling Arabic on slates; while between the knees of the turbaned master a tiny baby scholar, of three or four, is standing in a lovely dull green coatlet. Elizabeth strokes the baby-learner's coppery cheek with her light hand, and says, with a laugh, that it seems odd to see little street-boys writing Arabic; but her laughter is no longer the bubbling, irrepressible joy-drunk thing it was before he had indulged in his tactless reminiscences; it is the well-bred, civil, grown-up sound that so often has no inside gladness to match it. In his vexation with himself for the clouding over of his little heaven that he himself has effected, he tries to persuade himself that it is caused by bodily fatigue. "If I were asked," he says, by-and-by, looking down affectionately at her pallid profile, "I should say that you had had about enough of this; your spirit"--smiling--"is so very much too big for your body that one has to keep an eye upon you." "It would not be much of a spirit if it were not," replies she, with a pretty air of perfectly sincere disparagement of her own slight proportions; "I know that I look a poor thing, but I am rather a fraud: I do not tire easily; I am not tired now." "Bored, then?" with a slight accent of pique. She lifts her sweet look, with a sort of hurry of denial in it. "Most distinctly not." "You would like to go on, then?" "Yes." "Or back?" She hesitates, her eye exploring his with, as he feels, a genuine anxiety in it to discover what his own wishes are, so that her decision may jump with them. "Yes--perhaps; I have really no choice." He both looks at and speaks to her with a streak of exasperation. "Do you never have a will--a preference of your own?" It is evidently no unfamiliar thing to her to be addressed with causeless irritability. The recollection of her father's tone in speaking to her flashes back remorsefully upon Jim's memory. Is he himself going to take a leaf out of that book? It would be a relief to him were she to answer him sharply; but to do that is apparently not within her capabilities, though the tender red that tinges her cheek shows that she has felt his snub. "In this case I really have not," she answers gently; "but I dare say that it was tiresome of me not to speak more decidedly; let us--let us"--another swift and apparently quite involuntary glance at him to see that she is not, after all, running counter to his inclinations--"let us go home!"