other dancers were naturally Brenda and Manlio, partners for the cotillion. Certainly the plot for giving those two a few beautiful last hours together was proving

a success.

Brenda was calmly, collectedly luminous; Manlio, uplifted to the point of not quite knowing what he did. Radiant and desperate, he looked to Gerald, who found his state explained by the facts as he knew them.

He had been glad to find the Fosses sharing his point of view that to forbid Giglioli a sight of Brenda before the long parting would have been unnecessarily cruel. Mrs. Hawthorne, it seemed to him, had lost sight of what was to follow. She was exclusively delighted with their joy of the evening, she gave no thought to their misery next day. It was amazing to him, the extent to which she had forgot

ten.

So he said aloud, "Poor things! Poor dears!" and discovered that it was not forgetfulness exactly in Mrs. Hawthorne, but that general optimism which insists on believing in a loophole of possibility through which things can slip and somehow turn out right after all.

THE party was over. The last halfdozen people were standing and laughing with Mrs. Hawthorne and Miss Madison around Percy Lavin while he told a final good story, when one of the guests who had departed some time before returned.

Mrs. Hawthorne caught sight of the figure in closed coat, tall hat, and white silk muffler as soon as it entered the house, for the group of laughers stood near the ball-room door, and this was only separated from the inner house door by the wide hall. Without waiting for the end of the comic story Mrs. Hawthorne hurried to the guest, whose reason for returning she naturally wished to know, though. it easily might have been only his forgot

ten cane.

That it was nothing of the kind she at once perceived. He looked upset.

"May I speak with you a moment?" he asked at once.

They stepped into the nearest room, still brightly lighted, but deserted.

"What's the matter?" she inquired, prepared by his face for news of trouble.

"Mrs. Hawthorne, we 've done it!" said Gerald. "Giglioli tells me that he 's giving up the army, and Brenda has promised to marry him!" He was on the verge of laughing hysterically.

"Oh!" Mrs. Hawthorne paused to watch him, and wonder why they should. not without further to-do rejoice and triumph. "Well? What's wrong with that?"

"O Mrs. Hawthorne, it 's deadly!" he exclaimed with conviction. "If it were a simple solution, why should n't it have been suggested before?"

"It did suggest itself to me, in the quiet of my inside, you know."

"But you, dear lady, can't be supposed to understand. Oh, it 's either too, too beautiful, or else too, too bad! And in this dear world of ours the probability is that it's too bad. He was taken off his feet by his emotion; he offered her what he will feel later he had no right to offer

a good deal more than his life. But it shows, does n't it, that he does immensely love her. To throw into the balance everything-his career, his family, his country-and offer them up! To cut his throat for a kiss."

"You 're quite right; I can't understand," she hurried in. you say 'cut his throat'? into some other business the army?"

"What makes Could n't he go just as well as

"All in the world he 's fitted for is the army. Do you see that beautiful fellow going to America, for instance, and earning a living as a teacher of Italian, or as the representative of some tobacco intercst? There is no way of earning a proper living over here, you know. Oh, I'm afraid he will feel, when he wakes up, like a deserter toward his country and an ingrate toward his family and even toward Brenda like a misguider of her youth."

"But, look here, is n't there a chance that having each other will make up to them for everything else?"

"That of course was their sentiment at the moment of doing it. We did the work so well, Mrs. Hawthorne, that their passion, raised to a beautiful madness, would make them see anything as possible to be done so long as it gave them to each other, obviated the horrible necessity to part. Oh, it is touching, but dreadful! What were we dreaming? The thing I so greatly fear is that when he comes to himself he will feel dishonored, and Italians do not bear that easily, if at all."

"Now see here, don't you go imagining things, and worry. And don't you let that young man worry. He is n't leaving the army to-morrow or the day after, is he?" "No. In the natural course of things, I suppose, it will take some time."

"Well, I don't at all relish, myself, the idea of seeing that beautiful fellow, as you say, in every-day clothes-the sort they wear over here-after seeing him all glorious in silver braid and stars. No, I just can't bear to think of him giving them up. At the same time I don't agree with you that he had better have given up his girl than them. And I don't believe she will mind about his clothes one way or the other."

"But there is his family, a thousand obligations-he spoke of them himself."

"Perhaps the Fosses, now this has happened and they see how much in earnest the blessed creatures are, will sell some of

their stock in California gold-mines and afford the dowry you spoke of."

"But Giglioli will blush at this forcing of their hand."

"Now, see here, you keep that young man cool. He has n't done anything to be ashamed of. Brenda knows her own mind, and I don't believe her father and mother would stand in the way of her marrying a tramp if he was honest and her heart set on him. You tell that young man, in your own way, to sit tight and put his trust in the Lord."

Gerald's nervous laughter for a moment got the better of him. He covered his face to check it, then, tearing away his hands, made the gesture of releasing a pack of tugging hounds too strong for him to hold. Let them be off and at the devil!

"I did n't come here looking for comfort, dear Mrs. Hawthorne. Your optimism is constitutional, you know, rather than enlightened. I merely came to tell my accomplice the result of our meddling with destiny. 'Accomplice' is a manner of speaking. Don't suppose I forget that I alone am to blame. Good night. I must go back to him where I left him, with his head among the stars and clouds, and his feet perhaps beginning to burn already with the heat of the nether fire. As you say, let's be cheerful, let 's hope for the best! Ha!"

THE CARAVAN

With my own eyes I saw in the desert That the deliberate man outstripped him who had hurried on.

The wind-footed steed is broken down in

his course,

While the camel-driver jogs on with his beast to the end of the journey.

ONF

-SADI: "The Flower-Garden."

NE of my study windows, catching all the sun of the south, faces a narrow, tilted country of gardens, darkly walled by a semicircle of mountains. One of my bedroom windows gives me a glimpse of sparser gardens and the claycolored town and the plain that dips and rises delicately against the north. But both rooms look east, into the desert.

It is the kind of desert that the Persians call biaban, not the vaster and more desolate lut. Beyond our own, however, no garden wall ventures into it. Neither house nor poplar breaks the simplicity of its flowing lines. The empty land droops away toward the left, intercepted only by the Musalla, that barren bluff which archæologists like to fancy the site of seven-walled Ecbatana. Not quite opposite my windows a smaller hill,

bare and pointed like a cone, pricks

the horizon. Beyond it lies an invisible hollow, the farther edge of which marks the limit of my visible. world.

Of the sights to be seen from the four sides of our house this view offers least. Yet because it is mine I like it, and because it is so open and solitary, and because the faithful Persian sun rarely disappoints me there of his morning miracle, and because at night stars hang there of a brilliancy I have never seen, and so low that I can watch them from my bed. And I am new enough from the West never to forget that those windows look into Asia. Beyond that uneven rim of the east lies Kum. Beyond Kum is the lut, that great desert which has small reason to be less renowned than Gobi and the Sahara. Beyond the lut are Afghanistan, and Kashmir, and Tibet.

In the morning the sun looks strange to me, because he is fresh from Tibet and Kashmir and Afghanistan. At night the stars make me wonder what other watchers see them what riders of camels, what prowlers of the dark, what sitters by red embers. How many times have I made in imagination that journey. eastward from my window, across

wastes of salt and sand and poisoned water, through forests and glaciers that prop the sky, into valleys the wildest and most secret of the earth, that journey which no man of the West could make alone or undisguised and come alive into the uplands of China. And if he did, no man of all he met could understand the reason of his coming. They have no curiosity about us, the lands we live in, the things we live for. Why have we so continuing a curiosity about them? Is it that in those distant and silent places we would not once hear a factory whistle or see a railroad track? Is it the lure of their jealous seclusion? Of their cloudy antiquity? Is it a simple astonishment that men can be content with so little, find the sight of the sun enough, and the sound of known voices? Who knows but there might be in it some vague ancestral stirring of nostalgia or a secret question of our own unrest? What if, after all, they of the East see the end from the beginning, and live a life more. intense than we? But even there whistles begin to sound. Nearer and nearer creep the rails that thread the ends of the world. And what then? I could never tell all I see in the desert at night.

In the daytime I am more concerned with what passes between our garden wall and the crumpled rim of the horizon. There is no great passing on that tawny slope save of light and shadow, for the highways all march out of the town in other directions. Runnels of

the autumn and in the spring oxen tickle

the earth with the little wooden plow of Asia. There is a time when I watch the rippling of wheat like a lake. That is also the time when I may hear, heightened by distance, a melancholy singing. Peasants occasionally pass, with russet rags flapping about bare knees. A rare horseman gallops afar, his dark mantle eddying behind him. Mules and donkeys are less rare, tinkling from nowhere to nowhere.

Silence is so much the note of the place that I was astonished one winter afternoon to hear a new sound, a jingle-jangle that grew louder as I listened. I was the more astonished because snow was deep on the ground, and passers had been fewer than ever. I went to the window to look. Camels! Out of the crack between Musalla and the town they came, the dark line of them lengthening obliquely across the snow till it reached the corner of the garden above ours. I am a child about camels. I shall never see enough of them. It is not only their strangeness, however, which for us of the West makes them the symbol of Asia. They are immensely decorative in themselves, though they are so much the color of the lands they live in that they have a curious power of invisibility, for creatures so large, unless you catch them against the sky. But the snow brought out the silhouettes of these the

more fantastically because of the loads lashed on each side of their humps. I caught glimpses of sad

dle-cloths and big saddle-bags woven like the precious rugs of the country. Necklaces of bright beads made another touch. of color, or dangling plaques of beads, with much blue in them to ward off the evil eye. And the camels wore almost as many bells as beads. Some carried them around their necks in strings. A few beasts, bigger than the rest, had one great copper bell slung from the saddle, which rang out a slow ding-dong amid the general jingle-jangle. It made me think of Charpentier's "Impressions d'Italie," and the way he suggests the tinkling of mule-bells. But this was something deeper and wilder, and evoked the endless marches of the desert.

There were more camels in that caravan than I had ever seen before. It did not occur to me to count them until many of them were out of sight; then I counted nearly three hundred. They marched in single file in groups of six or seven, each group roped together like barges in a tow and led by a man. Many of the men had an odd Mongolian look in their little, round fur caps, with the skin outside. The eyes of almost all of them were inflamed from the glare of the sun on the snow. Where had they come from? Where were they going? I had no tongue to ask, nor could I have understood if they told me. They disappeared at last among the bare gardens. But that strange, complicated music, punctuated by the deep notes of the big copper bells, sounded so long in the thin winter air that I could not be sure when it ceased to sound. Indeed, I often hear it now at night when I look at the low stars of the desert, and think of Afghanistan and Kashmir and Tibet.

BELOW-STAIRS

THE most characteristic color of our house, to my inquisitive eye, is imparted

by its retainers. You of the effete West are wont to the soft ministrations of the eternal feminine. To us of Ecbatana is permitted no such luxury.

I

may note, however, the exceptional case of firengis with young children. A lady of the land may then risk her reputation by entering the presence of corrupt Christian men. She does so barefooted, in full trousers of a figured red print, loosely swathed in a length of black or white cloth covering her head and held for decency's sake in front of her mouth. Custom, of course, will make her less meticulous; but when a stranger is present and her duties require the use of both her hands, it is astonishing how ingenious she is in holding her veil in her teeth and in keeping her back on the quarter of peril.

There is another exceptional case to be noted of a country where laundresses are more than likely to have smallpox in their houses. They answer to the most romantic names: Deer, Sugar, Angel, Peacock, Parrot. To you, however, they are generically known as Sister. They carry on their operations in big blue-glazed bowls, preferably set on the ground near the clothes-lines, beside which they squat on their heels. I remember one of them who sent us one week a substitute. Inquiring into the matter, the khanum (that is, the mistress of the house) was told: "She makes a petition: she will have a child. But she will come next week." And she did.

The milking of a cow is one more ex