"So that was the mistake?" I said, reviving. "But how did you know? We have n't come to that yet, have we? Did she keep her appointment?" "At four o'clock next day she rang me up. It was really four-thirty, but you can't expect those children to be punctual. I was wondering whether she would keep her promise when the bell tinkled. I went to the instrument, they used to hang upon the wall in those days, and it was she all right. That afternoon I found out more or less who she was. She did not tell me her name, but she told me that she was a Moslem lady in a harem; that life was very wearisome; that she had been to Constantinople and that she longed to go to Europe; that she had had a French governess and had studied English; and that she lived in a house near the ministries, beyond Bab Ul Luk. She said that she was guarded by her mother-in-law and by eunuchs and that she would like to talk to me whenever she could.

"Have you a wife?' she asked.
"Not yet,' said I.

""Then you have a mistress?' "Are you not ashamed?' It made her laugh; and next she asked me where I lived, what Mrs. Todd was like, how much Marini paid me, and any question that occurred to her.

"She was full of questions, and she had a most charming, flute-like voice. Her French was very good, but her English was funny and delightful. She had studied it with a French lady and with books. "Ow you say "orse"?' she asked; and it was always 'Ow you say?' when it came to a word that puzzled her. My Arabic was not very much better, and she laughed at me when I tried it, and she said that she regarded it as a common and vulgar

tongue, preferring Turkish. For she was of Turkish origin, like all the high Egyptian society of those days, which had come out when the country was linked with Constantinople, and her father was a pacha and her husband was a bey. One talked in Arabic with one's servants, she explained.

""But I am your servant.' 'Abd-elGamila' I translated it.

""Thank you,' she answered; 'but you cannot see if I am beautiful.'

"She was not in love with her husband, she told me, on her third visit. He was always in Cairo, running after artistes. These were the European ladies who came in the winter and danced and sang at the variety shows in the modern quarter of the town. She had been given to him when she was seventeen; until her bridal night she had never seen him. He had courted her and won her, as is customary among the educated, and they had been happy together for a year.

"It was a curious and remote world into which I had stumbled. Almost every day we chatted together, sometimes earlier and sometimes later; and though I had never entered, nor was ever likely to enter, the harem in which she dwelt, I began to know its routine, the detail of her daily life, and even the aspect of that mysterious house wherein she was hidden.

"You are an Englishman,' she once asked, 'and so you are tall and fair, with blue eyes and no beard?'

"I told her that I was dark and that neither of my eyes was blue.

"She was disappointed at this, for every race admires its opposite.

"And you are very fat,' I said, 'in your black habara?'

"She denied it indignantly, and said that she was petite and that she wore her black habara only out of doors. Indoors she dressed like a European; and she told me all about her clothes. She liked bright colors, she said, and dresses that were décolletté. The dressmakers came to her house, and so did many of the other tradesmen, but sometimes she drove into the European quarter and chose things for herself. She paid visits to other ladies, she read French novels and made embroideries. She often told me what she ate at her meals, and how she had been to the opera and sat in one of those boxes that are screened off so that none may see. Her name, I at last discovered, was Ziba, and her husband was Omar Bey Taher. Perhaps I knew him? He was always driving about with his French artiste, a blonde and stout. One day when she made

sweetmeats-she was very clever at making sweetmeats-she would send me some by a reliable messenger, if she could find one. But they never came.

"It may seem absurd, but I began to look forward to these ridiculous conversations. Madame Shervinton, a dear lady who used to keep me in order, had departed; I had few friends; most of my life was prosaic and abominably dull: but here was the spot of light, and being young, I pictured her as beautiful and fragile, and I loved the sound of her voice and the curious turns it took as we met in secret and talked with growing intimacy along that wire.

"She had a great eagerness to hear about our life in the world outside, yet much of it was beyond her and impossible for her to follow. Pleasure and every form of indulgence she could understand; but that people had to

work to get their living, that the life of the ordinary man or woman was made up of struggle and endurance, she never seemed to grasp. No one in her world had ever done any work that mattered even in politics or in the philanthropy which often occupies our own aristocracy. She was like a flower growing in a garden, a bird singing in a tree, but safe and secluded in her gilded cage, guarded by old women and eunuchs and hidden behind high walls.

"I said one day that I would call and pay her a visit, and at that she took fright and begged me most beseechingly to stay away. No one must ever know that we had spoken together, she insisted. I soothed her and calmed her and said I was only joking, but on the day of her twentieth birthday—she told me of it-I had great difficulty in restraining myself from sending her flowers. But to do that I would have to make a confidant, and all these people talk or take bribes or spy upon one another. No, it could n't be done, and we had to rest content with congratulations.

"It was on the next day that Omar Bey Taher and his artiste came in and ordered a carriage by the month. It was to be regularly at the disposal of the French lady, a showy person, very colored and powdered, very much bejeweled, very emphatic, and decidedly out to exploit her Moslem lover. Taher was a noble-looking creature, with velvet eyes, dark, beautifully dressed, an aristocrat in his own way, and spoilt thoroughly spoilt, as are all these harem-bred Turks of the upper classes. You felt that if he were denied a thing, he would weep till he got it, like a badly brought up child, though he must have been close on forty and was

growing rather plump. He settled his business easily, and the French lady led him out again. She was to ring for her coupé whenever she wanted it, and Taher Bey would settle the bill. That was understood.

"I bowed them out, and though I maintained a professional secrecy, Ziba, in her harem, took three days to discover this new transaction; for though all these ladies are locked up and presumably remote from the world, they seem to know more about its intimate happenings than such as run free. She was not the least bit jealous. Taher was nothing much to her now, and he could do as he pleased.

"My next meeting with this erring husband occurred a few weeks later. He came in by himself this time. He said that he was very pleased with the coupé we had provided for madame— very pleased. And the costume of our driver was distinguished, and the horses were very good and of a beautiful appearance. But, really, he had not come in to pay me compliments. He arrived at his point at last, and it was that one of his own private horses had gone lame, and another was suffering from sand colic, and the ladies of his household would require a carriage till both animals were recovered. He asked us our terms, therefore, if we would hold a second carriage at his disposal; and this time, though he had been very grand and indifferent in the presence of the French artiste, he haggled and bargained like a man in the bazaars.

"In any case, I was determined to oblige him, and he little suspected that I had even been warned of his coming; for Ziba, excited and gay, had already been at the telephone and had

told me how the bey, after a visit to his stables, had himself announced that there was a place in the townMarini's where a very good carriage could be hired till the need was over. He had suggested this himself, and Ziba had looked all innocence. It had been difficult, she said, not to cry out and laugh about it.

"Quite ignorant of the comedy he and I were now enacting, the bey insisted that, as he was hiring a second carriage, the price should be a low one. I kept up appearances sufficiently to fight him for a quarter of an hour as we sat and smoked over it, and then I yielded, and he was very pleased with his bargain. The ladies, he added, would telephone, he seemed very proud of his telephone, or they would send a servant every morning with their demands. These would not be excessive. They must take the air, they would pay visits, and do their shopping.

"And you will not ruin the horses by filling the carriage with a dozen people?' I could n't resist fooling him a little further.

"Only Egyptians do that,' he answered contemptuously. 'We are Turks, et très distingué même très distingué,' he added.

"I bowed him out, and wondered when Ziba would ask for news. She turned up later in the day, after her siesta. She lived like a cat, I had discovered, rising late, sleeping when she felt like it, dressing when she felt like it, often waiting till noon for her bath; something of a slattern indoors, it seemed to me, and spending hours and hours over her toilet. This afternoon she had slept till five, eaten curdled milk,-yahourt, they call it, and was now at the telephone. I told her about

the bey's visit and how he had bargained.

"Pig!' she cried. 'But now I will see you; I want to see you,' she said. 'We will arrange that; we cannot forever go on at the telephone.'

"It was she who had proposed it, though it 's not for me to play at Adam and say that I was tempted; for I was just as eager, in spite of my laughter and my reservations. I was young, and this secret romance, these trysts and hidden conversations, had eaten their way into my life. Amid the vapor and emptiness of this Eastern capital, indeed, this meant something to me; and to-day I discovered it, as she spoke so wildly. It was the one thing vital in all that life.

$ 5

"The first time she went driving in one of our coupés it was with her mother-in-law, and they were first going shopping and then they would pay a visit at another harem out at Abbassia. She was well satisfied with the carriage I sent her, and its pair of well-matched grays, and the flowers I had placed in a bracket. It was 'très chic,' she said; but perhaps one day she would go alone, for she wanted to see me, to see me with her own eyes. She was not particularly backward. They never are, these Eastern women; for love is the business of their lives.

"A second time she went driving, again with that accursed mother-inlaw, this time 'to smell the air,' as they call it. They had gone for a couple of hours on the road that leads to the Pyramids and come back through the dusk of the evening. dusk of the evening. They had seen green birds in the fields and had watched the sunset and the waters that still stood where the Nile had

been in flood. It had all been very beautiful, but she had wanted to see me, and again she thanked me for the flowers that were in the carriage. The old woman had taken these and placed them in a jar of water. Now Ziba had come in, and she had changed her outdoor things and put on a new dress of palest-yellow silk. She wished I could see her in it. It was cut low, and she wore no corsets; it was only old women or fat women who needed corsets, or the mothers of many children. But she was young, soon I would see how young she was, her mother-in-law was going on a visit to Alexandria, and then it might be contrived.

"I will be in the carriage alone,' she said two days after this; 'perhaps we can at least see each other, though we shall not be able to speak.'

"I was again at the telephone, and she at the other end. They had had a carriage in the morning to take the old lady to the station, and had asked that it should be sent o'clock that afternoon. three, and in the cool month of February.

back at five

Now it was Now it was and pleasant

"I will drive you myself,' I said on the spur of the moment.

"But you,' she answered-'you who are a gentleman!'

vide themselves punctiliously between their wives; he had one up near the citadel and another at Bulak, and every evening he went home in turn to her whose day it was. He wondered what I was doing in a native livery.

"I will take the next carriage out,' I said.

"But that one is going to Taher Bey,' he answered, 'to a harem.'

""I wish to try the two chestnuts; you will put them in.'

"But there will be Moslem ladies in the carriage.'

"That does not matter.'

""There is a Frankish lady who is going out a little later,' he persisted. "It is the horses I wish to drive, not the ladies,' I cut him short.

"He went off muttering, but did as he was told.

"I drove the coupé round to the old gray palace behind Bab Ul Luk. I had placed a box of Groppi's best chocolates on the little seat and flowers as usual. I had seen the house before by sunlight and by moonlight, with its porters and eunuchs at the gates, its selamlik on one side, the lodge where Taher Bey received the gentlemen of his acquaintance, and the harem, where no one entered but women or the men of the family, filling up the

"I thank you,' she said. "There will be Hamouda, the eunuch; he will spy on us.'

""I will be discreet.'

"About four o'clock that afternoon, appropriately dressed, I went down to the yard. Abdul, our head man, looked at me inquisitively. He was one of those pious Moslems that pray and prostrate themselves wherever they may happen to be, and who di

walls inclosing a garden, but no one could enter here except at risk to Ziba and himself; for the law of these people was their own law, in spite of the courts and the British officials who ruled outside.

"I drove up and waited, and one of the two eunuchs went in and announced me, and presently the door of the harem opened, and Ziba herself came down the steps and into the little front garden that was railed off from