As for David, he had a house
of his own in a corner of Westchester County, inherited from his
parents, who had been well-to-do. He told her about his family and his
childhood--his feeling of strangeness amid persons who had thought him
very queer, and had tried by every means to make him conform to their
ideals of thought. "I was a sort of black sheep," he declared,
"because some necessity compelled me to be myself. I could never get
over my skepticism about a thousand things that seemed plain to those
good folks----"

The candles flickered before his hypersensitive face. The band in the
Square continued to play Strauss's _Rosen aus dem Sueden_, with its old
suggestions of agile grace, united movement, young men and maidens
joyously dancing away toward kisses and laughter. The servants brought
in the fresh course. Lilla cut up David's food, then held the fork to
his lips; for the man who had scrawled that concerto could not lift his
hands high enough to feed himself. He faltered:

"Your dinner will get cold."

"All the better, on such a hot night."

"Yes," he sighed, "you ought not to be here in this oven of a city."

"Oh, I!" she retorted, with moisture in her eyes.

In the drawing-room Hamoud-bin-Said paced to and fro, sometimes
standing before the picture by Bronzino, and seeming to stare clear
through it. He was serene, as water is serene that has been lashed by
tempests, and that holds in the depths of its placidity secrets that
none can discern. He was always near nowadays, on the fringe of their
lives, just beyond the radius of their preoccupations, the silent
witness of this strange love affair, in the humble station that Allah,
for some inscrutable reason, had decreed for him.

CHAPTER XXIX

One night when she was expecting David to dinner, she turned round,
from arranging some flowers in a vase in the drawing-room, to see
Cornelius Rysbroek in the doorway. He had come, he declared, to "take
her out somewhere, give her a breath of fresh air, and make her listen
to reason."

"But I'm dining here, Cornie."

"Alone?"

"No."

Nevertheless, he sat down with a dogged look.

"What's to be the end of this?" he demanded. "I suppose you know what
a lot of chatter this nonsense of yours has stirred up? They're even
saying that you're engaged to him. It's perfectly monstrous."

It was his old tone of voice, throaty, quaintly didactic, precise from
spite and yet muffled by rage; but it