thought, with a
sort of comic despair, "doomed by fate, as well as by my own
foolishness, to learn a language like the snarling of camels? Or is it
that his old Allah has picked me out to tide him along for a while?"
She wanted to laugh aloud, at the restlessness, superstition, weakness,
and folly that had composed her life, and had now produced this
egregious interview. And in the midst of this emotion she was touched
by his statuesque face, with its glimmering suggestion of gentility
cast down, of pride lost in a dread that she might not find him worth
her charity.

"I shall expect you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at eleven
o'clock."

He bowed in silence. She felt his relief that was mingled with a sense
of abasement; and she wondered what he had been, that he should suffer
from the prospect of turning an honest penny.

CHAPTER XX

She received a note from Brantome, informing her that if she went to a
certain orchestral concert she would hear a piece that David Verne had
written at the height of his promise.

To Lilla it was a new voice in the world of music, ultra-modern, yet
incorrigibly melodic, giving utterance to immemorial emotions with
great nobility. Those passages of almost intolerable aspiration were
underlaid with dissonant harmonies, as if hell itself had poured all
its allurements into tone, to engulf the theme that was struggling to
soar upward. It became a terrific combat, in which beauty was to be
recognized in sublimated form, striving to end its likeness to another
beauty, seductive in a different, monstrous way, yet all too similar.
It was a battle translated into sound, so enlarged and enriched by the
imagination of the composer that a universe, instead of one soul,
seemed to be involved in it.

Suddenly in the midst of a piercing blare of brass there was a moment
of chaos; then the theme, as if soaring free, lost itself in
extraordinary altitudes, borne up by a whirl of violin notes. A crash
of cymbals ended everything.

When she roused herself at last, Lilla perceived that the concert hall
was empty except for the ushers who were turning up the seats.

CHAPTER XXI

Hamoud-bin-Said suggested that she master first the most difficult
consonants--"ha," to be pronounced with the force at the back of the
palate, "dad" and "ta," emphasized by pressing the tongue far back, and
the strong guttural "en." These were sounds that had no association
with any in English,