rlotta's consumption.

After a while unconquerable drowsiness crept over me; and a little
later I had an odd sense of perfect quietude. I was lying amid moss and
violets. In a languorous way I wondered how my surroundings had changed,
and at last I awoke to find my head propped on Carlotta's lap and
shaded by her red parasol, while she sat happy in full sunshine. I was
springing from this posture of impropriety when she laughed and laid
restraining hands on my shoulders.

"No. You must not move. You look so pretty. And it is so nice. I put
your head there so that it should be soft. You have been sound asleep."

"I have also been abominably impolite," said I. "I humbly beg your
pardon, Carlotta."

"Oh, I am not cross," she laughed. Then still keeping her hands on me,
she settled her limbs into a more comfortable position.

"There! Now I can play at being a good little Turkish wife." She
fashioned into a fan the _Matin_ newspaper, which I had bought for the
luxurious purpose of not reading, and fanned me. "That is what Ayesha
used to do to Hamdi. And Ayesha used to tell him stories. But my lord
does not like his slave's stories."

"Decidedly not," said I.

I have heard much of Ayesha, a pretty animal organism who appears to
have turned her elderly husband into a doting fool. I am beginning to
have a contempt for Hamdi Effendi.

"They are what you call improper, eh?" she laughed, referring to the
tales. "I will sing you a Turkish song which you will not understand."

"Is it a suitable song?"

"Kim bilir--who knows?" said Carlotta.

She began a melancholy, crooning, guttural ditty; but broke off
suddenly.

"Oh! but it is stupid. Like the Turkish dancing. Oh, everything
in Alexandretta was stupid! Sometimes I think I have never seen
Alexandretta--or Ayesha--or Hamdi. I think I always am with you."

This must be so, as of late she has spoken little of her harem life; she
talks chiefly of the small daily happenings, and already we have a store
of common interests. The present is her whole existence; the past but
a confused dream. The odd part of the matter is that she regards her
position with me as a perfectly natural one. No stray kitten adopted by
a kind family could have less sense of obligation, or a greater faith
in the serene ordering of the cosmos for its own private and peculiar
comfort. When I asked her a while ago what she would have done had
I left her on the bench in the Embankment Gardens, she shr