They all laughed carelessly, as people in an idle humour laugh at trifles, and the carriage bore them on to their destination--a great house in Queen’s Gate, where a magnificent entertainment was being held in honour of some serene and exalted foreign potentate who had taken it into his head to see how London amused itself during a “season.” The foreign potentate had heard that the splendid English capital was full of gloom and misery--that its women were unapproachable, and its men difficult to make friends with; and all these erroneous notions had to be dispersed in his serene and exalted brain, no matter what his education cost the “Upper Ten” who undertook to enlighten his barbarian ignorance. Meanwhile, the subject of Lord Melthorpe’s conversation--El-Râmi, or El-Râmi-Zarânos, as he was called by those of his own race--was walking quietly homewards with that firm, swift, yet apparently unhasting pace which so often distinguishes the desert-born savage, and so seldom gives grace to the deportment of the cultured citizen. It was a mild night in May; the weather was unusually fine and warm; the skies were undarkened by any mist or cloud, and the stars shone forth with as much brilliancy as though the city lying under their immediate ken had been the smiling fairy Florence, instead of the brooding giant London. Now and again El-Râmi raised his eyes to the sparkling belt of Orion, which glittered aloft with a lustre that is seldom seen in the hazy English air;--he was thinking his own thoughts, and the fact that there were many passers to and fro in the streets besides himself did not appear to disturb him in the least, for he strode through their ranks without any hurry or jostling, as if he alone existed, and they were but shadows.