of the jewel-encrusted
_nargileh_ between his lips and the falcon upon a padded perch beside
him.

"Bring me a woman--to dance," he curtly ordered, and the slave sped to
do his bidding, with visions of a big increase in the banking-account
hidden in a secret place.

And when the dancer drifted in like a flower-petal upon a breeze, Hugh
Carden Ali looked up slowly, letting escape a wisp of smoke from
between his lips.

The dancer wore one single garment of transparent black, hung from the
shoulders by diamond bands and through which her perfectly nude body
shone like an ivory pillar; her slender feet with crimsoned toes and
heels were bare; the tiny hands ablaze with jewels; a huge bunch of
orange-tinted diamond-sprinkled osprey was fastened in her jet-black
hair; across her face there hung a short, almost transparent veil, one
corner of which she held between her teeth, leaving to view the
wonderful eyes, a heaven or hell of invitation--as you will.

She danced as had danced her Biblical sister to the pleasing of a king
for the attainment of her desire; and she danced humming a little tune
behind the veil until the movement of her beautiful body and the
knowledge of a man's eyes upon her went to her head like wine, so that
in the end, by force of habit maybe, she danced to conquer where she
had only intended to interest.

As already mentioned, she had the morals of a jackal.

She drifted down the court towards Hugh Carden Ali and, standing before
him, bowed her beautiful head to the level of her dimpled knees,
laughed gently, and was gone like a bird to a far corner of the court.

She seemed to swing in the air like a lime flower caught on the end of
a spider's thread, as she came slowly down once more; to be blown
hither and thither like a leaf before the gale as she ran here, sprang
there, to the rhythm of the little tune she hummed behind the wisp of
veil; to undulate, like a field of ripe wheat beneath the summer sun as
she stood quite near the man who watched her with a fraction of the
interest he would have shown in the purchase of a dog or falcon in the
open mart.

Her henna'd toes pressed firmly on the centre of a Persian rug of such
antiquity as to render the pattern indecipherable; she moved her body
from the slender waist downward not at all; the muscles of her arms and
shoulders rippled, and her head moved, slightly but unceasingly from
side to side.

How often one hears of the European's boredom