Then the low, soft, dreaming strains of music crept over to them and she began to dance. She had known the old Spanish dances all her life and loved them with all the wild blood in her, despising the more the conventional whirl of the drawing-room. She danced none of these to-night, however, but an improvisation, born of her knowledge of Moorish traditions, the place, and the hour. As Over realized what she purposed he stepped forward with the intention of stopping the performance, enraged that other men should be in the audience, but arrested by his distaste of a scene. In a moment he sank down on his cushions, wondering that he had doubted her, for it was apparent even in the first few moments that in spite of the graceful abandon of her dancing there was to be nothing to suggest the coarseness of the women that had danced on that spot before her. But if the swinging and swaying and bending and whirling of her body were without suggestiveness they were the very poetry of beauty. The scarf was bound about her head and over her face below the eyes, but she held a point in either hand, her arms sometimes extended, at others describing curves that made the delicate tissue flutter like the many wings of tiny birds. The spangles on her dress, the diamond buckles on her slippers were 1000 points of light, for the moon was poised directly overhead and flooding the court. The perfume of the scarf stole into the senses of the staring company and completed the illusion, delicately brushing with sensuousness what was otherwise an expression of the rhythm of life, the dreaming of an ardent but virginal soul. So a nautch-girl may have danced for the first time before a king, ignorant then of what was expected of her, dissolving in the joy of rhythmical motion, of innocent pride in her own young beauty. The arches between the company and the dancer, the fountain above the lions rising in a silver veil behind her, and beyond it the white, shining arches with their moving shadows, the distant warbling of the nightingales rising above the swooning music, the Oriental mystery in the eyes above the veil—not one of her audience but surrendered himself, although, in superficial fashion, all had recognized her. And then, while their senses were locked, while they were hardly conscious whether they slept or waked, a strange and terrible thing happened. From the Room of the Two Sisters beside them the figure of a man leaped like a sword from its scabbard, caught the dancer in his arms, and disappeared whence it had come. There was a fatal moment of incredulity; then Over leaped to his feet and ran into the dark room. But he had no idea which way to turn, and had lost himself in the Sala de los Ajimeces beyond when he heard Miss Holmes cry, sharply: “He mustn’t go alone, and at least I know every foot of the palace. The man will make for the underground rooms or climb out of one of the windows and down the hill to the Albaicin.”