cry, and a figure closely veiled would speed up the
path. Next could be heard the splash of oars of the first caique
homeward bound.

Locksmiths are bunglers in the East compared to patrols and eunuchs.
Lovers may smile, but they never laugh at them. There is always a day
of reckoning. A whisper goes around; some disgruntled servant shakes
his head; and an old fellow with baggy trousers and fez, says: "My
daughter, I am surprised" or "pained" or "outraged," or whatever he
does say in polite Turkish, Arabic, or Greek, and my lady is locked up
on bread and water, or fig-paste, or Turkish Delight, and all is over.
Sometimes the young Lothario is ordered back to his regiment, or sent
to Van or Trebizond or Egypt for the good of his morals, or his health
or the community in which he lives. Sometimes everybody accepts the
situation and the banns are called and they live happy ever after.

What complicated this situation was that the girl, although as
beautiful as a dream--any number of dreams, for that matter, and all of
paradise--was a plebeian and the young man of royal blood. Furthermore,
any number of parents, her own two and twice as many uncles and aunts,
might get together and give, not only their blessing, but lands and
palaces--two on the Bosphorus, one in Bagdad and another at Smyrna, and
nothing would avail unless his Imperial Highness the Sultan gave his
consent. Fruthermore, again, should it come to the ears of his August
Presence that any such scandalous alliance was in contemplation,
several yards of additional bow-strings would be purchased and the
whole coterie experience a choking sensation which would last them the
balance of their lives.

Thus it was that, after that most blissful night in the arbor--their
last--in which she had clung to him as if knowing he was about to slip
forever from her arms, both caiques were laid up for the season; the
first tight locked and guarded in the palace of the young man's father,
five miles along the blue Bosphorus as the bird flies, and the second
in the little boat-house in the small indent of a cove under the garden
holding the beloved arbor, the little white house, and My Lady of the
diaphanous veil and the all-absorbing eyes.

With the lifting of the curtain on the third act, the scene shifts. No
more Sweet Waters, no more caiques nor stolen interviews, the music of
hot kisses drowned in the splash of the listening fountain. Instead,
there is seen a sumptuously f