ot. I cannot describe the one who
lies in the midst of them. The cloth is drawn up to cover even his
face. But I feel that it is some one who has loved you. He is dead.
That is to say, he will be dead when the scene that I am describing is
realized; but now he is alive----"

Lilla, raising her eyes, saw in the doorway, with Fanny Brassfield, a
tall man, a stranger, whose countenance was aquiline and swarthy. It
was Lawrence Teck, the explorer.

CHAPTER VIII

In the music room some musicians were playing a waltz; but Lilla and
Lawrence Teck were walking on the terrace.

She said to herself, "This is a dream"; for she had come to believe
that only in dreams did one realize, even in faint counterpart, one's
deepest desires. She stood still. The world--this new world drenched
in an unprecedented quality of moonlight--gradually became distinct.
She gave him, through that veil of silvery beams, a long look of
verification.

As in his picture he seemed at once rugged and fine, resolute and
gentle. He was very quiet, like one who has willed to be so; but a
certain shyness remained in him, and presently announced itself to her.
Whereupon, remembering that she was beautiful, and that her beauty had
a way of troubling men, Lilla felt her own timidity transmuted into joy.

"Are your jungles better than this?" she asked.

"The charm of my jungles overlies a welter of stupid cruelty and deadly
waste. Would it surprise you to know that I should like to see all the
world as nobly ordered as this landscape?"

She did not grasp the meaning of the words, being too deeply occupied
with seizing upon those syllables, those living tones, and dropping
them one by one into the treasury of her heart.

Glancing down at the aquatic garden, he remarked:

"These three basins would please my Mohammedan friends, who like to see
their flowers inverted in still water, like a mirage come true."

"Yes, no doubt they have their ideals."

"And often dream of them in very pleasant places."

He described certain gardens of the East. He made her see nests of
color unexpectedly blooming in the midst of deserts, behind walls of
sundried mud overgrown with Persian roses, and with airy pavilions
mirrored in pools that were seldom darkened by a cloud. Under date
palms the white-robed Arabs sat smoking. From time to time black
slaves brought them coffee flavored with ambergris. After sundown, at
the hour called "maghrib," when the