"You'd have to be careful how you look, Jinny--and you can't help
that. The Lord who gave you red hair must provide the way to elude
its consequences.... I suppose the Orient isn't exactly a manless
Sahara for you?"

She countered, her bright eyes intent, "Is it a girl-less Sahara for
you, Jack?"

"The only woman I have laid a hand on, in kindness or unkindness,
died before Ptolemy rebuilt Denderah."

"That's not right--"

"No? And I thought it such a virtuous record!"

"I mean," Jinny laughed, "that you really ought to be seeing more of
life--like to-night--"

"To-night? Do you imagine this is a place for seeing life?"

"Why not?" she retorted to the irony in his voice. "It's real
people--not just dead and gone things in cases with their lives all
lived. I don't care if you are going to be a very famous person,
Jack, you ought to see more of the world. You have just been buried
out here for two years, ever since you left college--"

Beneath his mask the young man was smiling. A quaint feminine
notion, that life was to be encountered at a masquerade! This motley
of hot, over-dressed, wrought up idiots a human contact!

Life? Living?... Thank you, he preferred the sane young English
officials ... the comradeship of his chief ... the glamor of his
desert tombs.

Of course there was a loneliness in the desert. That was part of the
big feeling of it, the still, stealing sense of immensity reaching
out its shadowy hands for you.... Loneliness and restlessness....
These tropic nights, when the stars burned low and bright, and the
hot sands seemed breathing.... Loneliness and restlessness--but they
gave a man dreams.... And were those dreams to be realized here?

The music stopped and the ever-watchful Pantalon bore down upon
them. Abandoning Jinny to her fate, Ryder sought refuge and a
cigarette.

The hall was crowded now; the ball was a flash of color, a whirl of
satins and spangles and tulle and gauze, gold and green and rose and
sapphire, gyrating madly in vivid projection against the black and
white stripes of the Moorish walls. The color and the music had sent
their quickening reactions among the throng. Masks were lending
audacity to mischief and high spirits.

Three little Pierrettes scampered through the crowd, pelting right
and left with confetti and balloons, and two stalwart monks and a
thin Hamlet pursued them, keeping up the bombardment amid a great
combustion of balloons. A spangled Harlequi