And for a moment the rug from Samarcand, its five by seven feet of tawny, silken perfection putting to confusion the priceless Feraghan on which it had been unrolled, gleamed unregarded as Clarke's mind whirled to the sonorous accent with which the divine Hafiz had enslaved the East and its savage conquerors. "_Egher an Turki_----" Strange, how after all this time one would remember. It must be that one could never quite forget. The telephone rang; but Clarke ignored it until the jangling became too insistent, when he muffled the bell with several towels and a small cushion. "Too bad," he apologized, as he took the cord from his lounge robe and completed the throttling of the almost stifled annoyance, "but I simply can't be disturbed." In which he was wrong: for to contemplate that wonder from Samarcand was more disturbing than any voice that could creep in over the wire. He fingered the rings of dull, hand-hammered gold that were sewed to one of the selvaged sides; he wondered what palace wall had been enriched by that precious fabric--and with it all came the knowledge that that very rug had been a part of his own past. The life that had been knotted into its pile and the sorcery that had been woven into its pattern were speaking to one of Clarke's forgotten selves. Yet he was certain that he had never before seen it; for one could never have forgotten such as this, though seen but for an instant. Truly, the _rug_ was a stranger, but the presence that accompanied it was demanding recognition. In the meanwhile, Diane tired of hearing the operator's "They don't answer," and abandoned her efforts to remind Clarke of an engagement. "I wonder," she mused, as she finally set aside the useless telephone, "what deviltry my _bien aimé_ is devising." And then she sought the rendezvous unattended, and made the customary apologies for Clarke's unaccountable absence. He might have retreated into that dusky inner kingdom which from the very beginning he had held against Diane--a silence into which he plunged unaccompanied, not lacking appreciative company, but rather loving solitude and electing seclusion rather than the sharing of the fancies that twisted and the thoughts that writhed in his strange brain. As Diane made her well-rehearsed apologies and frothed behind her vivacious mask, Clarke noted the manila envelope that was fastened to the web of the rug from Samarcand, and addressed to him: a letter, doubtless from Siraganian.