The young man had fallen into a fitful doze, when he heard the pipe of Zaidee, followed by the rattle of small pebbles against his casement. An instant later, Nakir growled out hoarse words, which the listener could not understand. But the sound of heavy blows, under which Zaidee’s voice leapt into shrieks, then fell to sobs, needed no knowledge of a foreign tongue to be understood. Page Lomax rushed to the window. Jerking it open, he leaned out, but he could discern no one and the unbroken stillness seemed deathly to his overwrought nerves. To his great relief, Hosein’s maid floated in before them at breakfast the next morning. She came to dance, while they ate, as the raiment which she wore showed but too plainly to even the inexperienced eye of the American. From beneath a veil of fleecy gauze, which floated back freely instead of hiding her face (as is the custom with Moslem women), her loose locks rolled their midnight over her shoulders. Her bell-shaped sleeves had wrinkled back from bare uplifted arms, on which silver chains were throbbing in unison with the rising and falling of her white bust, caught in the snare of the ample V in her tight scarlet jacket. Below that, a third of her supple figure’s living satin blushed in full sight above the dark-green band, which clasped in place her divided skirt of pearly transparent stuff shimmering down thence to her naked round ankles. For a brief space the girl drooped her head and Page Lomax saw red shame feeding on her white cheek, while up from the dark depths of her mysterious eyes bitter tears were welling. But now hidden music swelled into a loud insistent fugue. With a faint sigh, almost a sob, Zaidee drifted forward as slowly and as softly as a summer cloud thro’ picture after picture of that old, old pantomime of the Orient, which illustrates the one text, true in every creed, “Male and female created He them.” With all his heart uncovered in his gaze, the young man hung on her every motion until, with a brusque finale, she snapped in twain the thread of wedded harmony and movement with the whirling gesture of one hand pointed toward the threshold. Her agonized glance searched his very brain. Her writhing lips syllabled the word, “Depart!” Then she vanished. To Hosein, this posturing to music was nothing new. With a strange and baffling smile, he had been scrutinizing Page Lomax, instead of Zaidee. Now he leaned toward him.