And she opens her eyes and they seem the wide gates of his Prophet’s heaven. And they have, to him, all the dewiness of honest youth. She asks with earnestness:— “But _how_ do we differ?” He defies those eyes. He says: “Both have dark hair, but Avanel’s is straight like that of the Japanese, and yours is a storm cloud about your head. “But _how_ do we differ? You need not deny you have studied that girl like a book. I have seen you watching her as though she were a growing scorpion, looking her over and over, at the Gordon Craig Theatre. “She is no scorpion, but an artless child. Her eyes are blue. Your eyes are black. Avanel’s skin is white and rose. You are more golden than any coin, or any sunrise. That is the difference.” And he smiles with an air of mock finality. But there is more difference and my American soul fights my Malay body and mind, as I apprehend this distinction, while they argue of other matters. I find torturing the very depths of me, that which loves Avanel, though I lie in this Malay grave. Yet the comparison is not all to the advantage of the daughter of Boone. Avanel follows the most conventional of _Vanity Fair_ and _Vogue_ fashion plates, when not a marching, dancing priestess or an equestrienne in white. The Kling beauty is in her library or in her palanquin wrapped in endless easy swathings of green silk from breast to knee. Her bare shoulders and knees and feet and hands are her father’s pride. He thinks there is nothing like their slender modelling in all the west. She is a singer with the Borneo harp. Avanel in her life as a religious dancer and leader of maiden cavalry and of the Horseshoe Brotherhood, is an unmaidenly horror to Mara, who prides herself on her seclusion. Avanel’s omnipresence on the streets, as the town heroine, seems to Mara America’s most complete scandal. Yet Mara has often been out in her palanquin, behind that of her father, ostensibly to please him, but actually to see if by chance this hated Avanel will go by. And she has brooded in seclusion over Avanel as much as such a gentle nature can.