She sat all day staring out of the barred window, looking beyond the wide Haouz plain to where the snow peaks of the High Atlas rose, a sheer wall of sun-lit silver—and beyond them even. She never smiled, she never spoke, she hardly touched her food. Ortho in all his experience had encountered nothing like her. He did his utmost to win her over, brought sweetmeats, laughed, joked, retailed the gossip of the palace and the souks, told her stories of romance and adventure which would have kept any other harem toy in shivers of bliss, took his gounibri and sang Romany songs, Moorish songs, English ballads, flowery Ottoman _kasidas_, _ghazels_ and _gûlistâns_, learned from Osman Bâki, cursed her, adored her. All to no avail; he might have been dumb, she deaf. Driven desperate, he seized her in his arms; he had as well embraced so much ice. It was maddening. Osman Bâki, who watched him in the lines of a morning, raving at the men over trifles, twisted his yellow mustache and smiled. This evening, however, Ortho was too full of elation to be easily repulsed. He had worked hard and intrigued steadily for this promotion. Three years before he had landed in Morocco a chained slave, now he was the youngest of his rank in the first arm of the service. Another few years at this pace and what might he not achieve? He bounded upstairs like a lad home with a coveted prize, told the girl of his triumph, striding up and down the room, flushed, laughing, smacking his hands together, boyish to a degree. He looked his handsomest, a tall, picturesque figure in the plum-colored breeches, soft riding boots, blue kaftan and scarlet tarboosh tilted rakishly on his black curls. The girl stole a glance at him from under her long lashes, but when he looked at her she was staring out of the window at the snow wall of the Atlas rose-flushed with sunset, and when he spoke to her she made no answer; he might as well have been talking to himself. But he was too full of his success to notice, and he rattled on and on, pacing the little room up and down, four strides each way. He dropped beside her, put his arm about her shoulders, drew her cold cheek to his flushed one. “Listen, my pearl,” he rhapsodized. “I have money now and you shall have dresses like rainbows, a gold tiara and slave girls to wait on you, and when we move garrison you shall ride a white ambling mule with red trappings and lodge in a striped tent like the royal women. I am a Kaid Rahal now, do you hear? The youngest of any, and in the Sultan’s favor. I will contrive and scheme, and in a few years . . . the Standard!—_eschkoun-i-araf_? And then, my honey-sweet, you shall have a palace with a garden and fountains. Hey, look!”