It was furnished with extreme simplicity and hung with the most inexpensive kind of thin Indian curtains. There were two or three small painted tables, on one of which was a common metal coffee-pot surrounded by three or four tiny earthenware cups, while on another stood a small decanter labelled brandy, an ice-pail, a stand with soda-water bottles, two deep tumblers, and a liqueur glass. The seats consisted of ottomans covered with dark striped stuff, a few plain large cushions, and a couple of low chairs, very small in the seat and very wide in the back. A brass lantern took the place formerly filled by a chandelier, and gave forth a soft weak light through orange-tinted glass. The floor was entirely covered by matting, which added to the invitingly cool aspect of the room. To the right as he entered from the front room, Lauriston noticed a tall paper screen placed before the doorway of a third apartment, the door of which had been taken away and replaced by thin coloured curtains, through which there shone a much brighter light than that given by the brass lamp. “My uncle’s room,” said Rahas, indicating the inner apartment with a movement of his hand, as he brought forth for his guest, from a cupboard in the wall behind the curtains, cigars, cigarettes, and a hookah. “He gives up the best to me, though I am only a junior partner in the firm, by right of my father--a mere clerk in fact.” Lauriston took a cigar and seated himself in a chair; while his host sat on one of the ottomans, his left elbow buried in a cushion, languidly smoking a long hookah. Something in the atmosphere of the room, its studied coolness, the stately composure of its owner, the faint perfume which began to rise from the bubbling water of the hookah, began to exercise over Lauriston the same enervating influence which he had felt in the far more luxurious chamber above. The soft voice of the merchant, speaking in measured tones, as if speech were spontaneous music, lulled him into a state of dreamy expectancy of some further experience new and strange. “You would fall very easily and naturally into our Eastern ways, more easily than most of your race, I think,” he said; and Lauriston felt conscious, now that he saw him reclining at his ease, of a charm in the manner of the Oriental which he had not seen before. “You can rest, which is to most of the men of North Europe an impossibility.” Lauriston sat upright in his chair, consciously struggling against the charm which was ensnaring his senses. “What you call rest,” he said earnestly, “is a temporary torpor necessary to you, a warmer-blooded race, and is the natural reaction from your passionate moods, in which you are all fire. But for us, a colder nation, what you call rest is a dangerous soothing of the mind and stimulating of the senses, an enslaving pleasure to be avoided by those who have a battle to fight, and much to win. The only wholesome rest for us is dead, dreamless sleep.”