maid?"

"She got away before us with your guide, Madame."

He held up his hands and looked at them hard, eagerly, questioningly.

"You weren't hurt?"

He dropped his hands quickly. "Oh, no, it wasn't----"

He broke off the sentence and was silent. Domini stood still, drew a
long breath and laughed. She still felt angry and laughed to control
herself. Unless she could be amused at this episode she knew that she
was capable of going back to the door of the cafe and hitting out right
and left at the men who had nearly suffocated her. Any violence done to
her body, even an unintentional push against her in the street--if there
was real force in it--seemed to let loose a devil in her, such a devil
as ought surely only to dwell inside a man.

"What people!" she said. "What wild creatures!"

She laughed again. The patrol pushed its way roughly in at the doorway.

"The Arabs are always like that, Madame."

She looked at him, then she said, abruptly:

"Do you speak English?"

Her companion hesitated. It was perfectly obvious to her that he was
considering whether he should answer "Yes" or "No." Such hesitation
about such a matter was very strange. At last he said, but still in
French:

"Yes."

And directly he had said it she saw by his face that he wished he had
said "No."

From the cafe the Arabs began to pour into the street. The patrol was
clearing the place. The women leaning over the balconies cried out
shrilly to learn the exact history of the tumult, and the men standing
underneath, and lifting up their bronzed faces in the moonlight, replied
in violent voices, gesticulating vehemently while their hanging sleeves
fell back from their hairy arms.

"I am an Englishwoman," Domini said.

But she too felt obliged to speak still in French, as if a sudden
reserve told her to do so. He said nothing. They were standing in quite
a crowd now. It swayed, parted suddenly, and the soldiers appeared
holding Irena. Hadj followed behind, shouting as if in a frenzy of
passion. There was some blood on one of his hands and a streak of blood
on the front of the loose shirt he wore under his burnous. He kept
on shooting out his arms towards Irena as he walked, and frantically
appealing to the Arabs round him. When he saw the women on their
balconies he stopped for a moment and called out to them like a man
beside himself. A Tirailleur pushed him on. The women, who had been
quiet to hear him, burst forth again into a parox