"You multi-colored, flashy, hieroglyphic son of a spavined grandsire, you stalking, frowning, sneering, swaggering imitation of something that is which amounts to something, you that are nothing whatsoever at all! Rotter, bounder, boob--you blurb, blip, you--don't you dare to answer me back or I'll set fire to your whiskers, you flea-bitten--why, what in the world's happened to 'em? Amut, where's your whiskers?" "Over there on the floor, back of you, my Queen," said the Sheik in strange, shivered accents due to swollen lips. "I don't seem to remember pulling them out." "O, I'm quite sure you didn't. You see----" "Good God," said Verbeena, "more treachery! Even his whiskers are false! "Tosh--I might have known--Lillian Russell top hair and Trotsky chin trimmings! "What was the idea of this face screen anyway? So's I wouldn't be able to identify you I suppose after you'd squeezed me dry and threw me over at Orange with all the rest of your amorous alphabet? Was that it, hey?" "No, by Allah, no," he sobbed, his haughty head tumbled among the silver, black, green, blue, pink and twilight yellow cushions. She drew forth the hatpin which is so much deadlier than the scarfpin of the species. "I swear! No--no, Queenie, no!" "Then why the Hawkshaws?" "Allah defend me--I cannot tell you--not if you kill me, my sweet wand of affliction!" "I don't know what I'll do later," said Verbeena. "But anyway, I'm going to make you marry me first. "Mac!" she called. "Hulda!" They came humbly. "Listen to this, both of you!" "Yea, O Queen," they answered. "Sheik Amut Ben Butler, you say you are king of this tail-end of the desert?" "With your kind permission, Verbeena, the First." "And Parliament and everything?" "Yes'm." "Well, Amut, old thing, right now you are in session. Pass a common law." "I--I----" "Stupid--like they have in America. A common law for marriage. If a man and woman agree to live together as husband and wife--that settles it. It goes, hook, line, sinker and breakfast cereals. But it is made all the more binding when there is a written agreement between them. "All in favor," she said with her eyes firmly on the passion-purged orbs of Amut, the non-abductor, "will say 'Aye!'" "Aye!" said the Sheik Amut Ben Butler in a loud, firm voice. But biting the while a quivering underlip, he soon burst into tears. Immediately Verbeena whipped out a paper from the breast of her Norfolk jacket and laid it before him. (That girl had just thought of everything! She even had a fountain pen right ready for him!) "Sign," she said simply. The red pepper wasn't all out his eyes by any means, but the broken, quivering creature was able to read: