Her face ached, her left ear ached and more awfully than either her peculiar temperament ached. Her face showed pain in every lineament. "I ask you," said the Sheik Amut in his slow, awful drawl, twirling the tassel of his magenta sash, "what's the idea of kicking up all this shindy? Aw--take off your necktie! Do you expect me to be your valet as well as lover?" "You----" she began in crashing opposition to any tomfoolery of a dark, questionable nature. "_Spaghetti!_" snapped the Sheik. She observed that he looked over her shoulder. She turned. She saw then a little fat man behind her just as he was answering reverently: "Aye--aye, Monseigneur!" "The----," the Sheik nodded fiercely at the little man. She hadn't a chance. She knew it. She saw the arm of Spaghetti only as it was descending. The hand held a canvas jacket of the size and shapely proportions of a corpulent bologna. And it was stuffed with Sahara. "See here!" cried Verbeena. "This is rotten. It's not cricket. I----" "Not cricket perhaps, but quite clubby," said Amut Ben Butler with his brutal smile. The blow fell. Verbeena vertigoed. CHAPTER VI When Verbeena came to she was the only one present. Outside she could hear the Sheik's horses whinnying among their oats and the incessant chaffing of his men. They swarmed outside there. And inside were other swarms. These were of flies and sandfleas. She was more or less grateful to them. They kept her for some little time from thinking of anything else. But, of course, eventually she had to begin to draw a few conclusions. The design of these proved cubistic and the coloring all to the palpitant pink, Gaugin green and yammering yellow. She sought pushing herself around on the divan trying to get away from herself, but always returned. Finally she sat up with her chin between her knees and her arms around her ears in a posture known to her blithesome boyish days as the "caterpillar crouch." But by no mental arrangement could she devise for herself a dittology regarding the cataclysmic cropper attendant upon her career and felt herself, therefore, thoroughly unmanned as well as fatally deladyized. She knew she'd never be able to look anybody in the face again. Especially a camel. Camels always had such nasty, disdainful expressions. From thought of camels she passed to that of Lady Speedway, and this caused Verbeena to do a full pinwheel on the cushions. If this affair ever got out wouldn't it just be pickled walnuts for old putty-faced, jabberwocking Speedway! O God! What a position she was placed in! O, gosh! She gave one of her old time boyish leaps from the couch and seized the small object she saw on a nearby tabaret. The object was the stump of a cigarette--a pretty long one. Thank heavens, indeed, that it hadn't burned itself to naught in the night!