You ought to have made that pilgrimage. In speaking of my book you expressed the wish that you might make such a trip, and those years would have been as great a playtime to you as to us. You could have borne the exposure, rough though the life was, and it would have been as compound oxygen to your brave and venturesome nature. I confess I do not like to think of that dazzlingly pure skin burned to any such blackness as I saw in my mirror on reaching the end of our journeyings; for truly no better Arab in verisimilitude strolled about the native quarter of Tangier in May, 1886, than Donald Maitland. My long study of those older races and three years’ life spent among them have not made me accept their dogma of fatalism, yet I must believe that something stronger than chance produced our meeting in that Moorish town. Down streams, over mountains, and across deserts, seas, and oceans, our paths had converged; on foot, mounted, by rail or boat, we came together as if some hidden magnet were drawing us both. A thousand chances were against our meeting, even when we were in the same town; for you were housed in the best hotel, while we lodged in a little Jewish place in the Berber quarter. In another day my father and I should have crossed to Spain, without so much as a visit to the European section. But for that meeting I should have returned to Leipzig, and passed a contented life as a Herr Doctor and Professor; for though my heart was still warm with love of you, it had been denied and starved too long to have the strength to draw me from the path my head had marked out. Yet I would not now accept the unemotional and peaceful career I had planned in lieu of my present life; for if my love is without hope, it is still love, and though you turned me away from your door with far less courtesy than you would shut out a beggar, yet I am near you and see you constantly, and that is worth more to me than peace. Good-night, my love. God bless you. VI _February 25._ It was thought of you which led to our meeting. After the evening meal of dried salt fish, pancakes, dates, and coffee, my father and I wandered out to the Sok, and, as was our wont, sat down among the people. Refusing the hasheesh water and sweetmeats which the venders urged upon us, “to make you dream of your love joyfully,” we listened to the story-tellers and the singers. Some one with a fine natural voice sang presently an Arabic love-song:— “My love, so lovely yet so cruel, Why came you so to torture me? Could I but know the being who Has caused you thus to hate me! Once I saw and gazed upon your lovely form each hour, But now you ever shun me. Yet still each night you come in dreams For me to ask, Who sent you? Your answer is, Him whom I love, And you bid me then forget my passion. But I reply, If it was not for love, how could the world go on?”