French, German, or Italian. Lilla was filled with
dismay.

"But this poor young man lost from the _Arabian Nights_ must live," she
reflected, eyeing the salt-and-pepper suit with secret horror.

He was extremely neat, however; and his small right hand, with which he
turned the pages of the textbook, was as well cared for as hers. He
brought with him into the library an almost imperceptible scent of
burnt aloes. His grave composure sometimes made her forget his youth.

Now and then, the lesson finished, she detained him in talk, out of
curiosity.

From his father he had inherited a house in Zanzibar, a mansion,
indeed, of coraline limestone fitted with doors of palmwood elegantly
carved. At the same time he had fallen heir to a grove of clove trees;
in short, he had been wealthy. There had been no end of hospitality in
his home. In the large, white rooms strewn with Persian carpets, where
there were no pictures, but a variety of clocks, the slaves were always
bringing in to visitors an excess of refreshment--stews of mutton, fine
soups, cakes, sherbets, Turkish delight. The world had been a good
place, full of friends.

And there was no spot as fair as Zanzibar! The hills, crowned with
palms, embraced a sea as deeply blue as lapis-lazuli. The clove trees
were covered with pink blossoms whose fragrance entered the city. It
was a place of brilliant sunshine and purple shadows, of gray walls
over which peacocks hung their tails, of mysterious stairways, and
latticed windows behind which ladies sat peering through their
embroidered face screens resembling semicircular candle shades; and
there was always a marvelous clamor in the streets, and silence in the
patios full of flowers. At dusk, one still saw, sometimes, the
daughters of the rich hurrying through the alleys, muffled up, escorted
by slaves with lanterns, going to call on their women friends, leaving
behind them a trail of perfumes.

"It was in Zanzibar," thought Lilla, "that Lawrence found my picture."

And gazing as if indifferently at a vaseful of roses, she asked, with a
feeling of suffocation:

"Why did you leave there?"

He did not reply. When she turned her eyes toward him he appeared to
be listening almost drowsily to something that she could not hear, or
else, since his sensitive-looking nostrils were dilated, to be
relishing some sweet odor--perhaps the smell of the roses. She
received an impression of deliberate, yet somnolent, sens