Danbazzar stood at his elbow. He spoke to Zalithea in that monotonous language which no one else understood. Under half-lowered lids she watched him, and then replied briefly. He turned to Jim. “She says you talk too much!” he translated. Jim turned fiery red. Barry laughed delightedly, and Professor Blackwell, who had just come in, endeavoured to console poor Jim. “She is a young lady of very definite ideas,” he said, groping with one large, bony hand for a dress tie which, having become unknotted, had evidently dropped off somewhere. “For instance, she has a settled belief that I’m funny!” “Please, Mr. Danbazzar!” whispered Jack. “Ask her if she likes me!” Danbazzar, whom nothing annoyed more than to be addressed as “mister,” conversed briefly, and unintelligibly, with Zalithea; then: “She is a little undecided,” he announced. “She has got hold of the idea that you’re a dancing girl and wants to know when you are going to begin!” CHAPTER XXVII. ABOUT IT AND ABOUT Danbazzar, in these days, was constantly at the Cumberland home. Next to Barry, it was evident that Zalithea preferred his society to that of anybody else. John Cumberland she respected, but he, for all his knowledge of the old, mysterious land in which they had found her, groped in vain with the strange tongue which she spoke and which Danbazzar alone understood. Nor was he so successful as his son in establishing a link of understanding. Perhaps because he did not speak the language of love, which is God’s esperanto. Nevertheless, and largely with Danbazzar as interpreter, he had begun his ambitious work. The first and second sections of the book came within scope of his personal knowledge. He believed that they were, now, comparatively valueless without the third. Therefore, beyond arranging his bulky notes, he had done little in this direction. His interest was with Zalithea’s story, and this she surrendered only in provoking fragments, imperfectly understood by Danbazzar. For instance, urged on one occasion to describe Pharaoh’s court, she became unusually voluble. Danbazzar looked puzzled, thought over what she had said for some time, and then: “It sounds to me,” he confessed, “uncommonly like back stage at the Metropolitan Opera House!” And a day was to come when those words should recur to Barry Cumberland. Social invitations hailed upon them. No door in New York was closed to Princess Zalithea. But She Who Sleeps was as capricious as she was lovely. Modern ideas of good behaviour she simply didn’t understand. They had learned from painful experience, to consult her, _vide_ Danbazzar, before accepting proffered hospitality. She would inquire closely into the character of the household and the probable guests before consenting to go. More often than not she flatly declined to be present.