a man-eating savage.

The Bedouin gravely inclined his head. "_Allahu Akbar!_" he responded,
in a soft voice.

Suddenly the caravan driver commenced a hurried and zigzag course across
the crowded floor. The eyes of Colonel Von Ritz indolently followed.

Through a low-silled window a girl had just entered, carrying herself
with the untrammeled freedom of some wild thing, erect, poised from the
waist, rhythmic in motion. Her walk was like the scansion of good verse.
The Bedouin caught the grace before the ensemble of costume met his eye.
It was in harmony.

She wore a silk skirt to the ankles, and about her waist and hips was
bound the yellow and red sash of the Spanish gipsy, tightly knotted, and
falling at its tasseled ends. Her arms were bare to the elbows, and gay
with bracelets; her hair fell from her forehead and temples, dropping
over her shoulders in two ribbon bound braids. A tall, gray-cowled monk,
whose military bearing gave the lie to his cassock, a Spanish grandee,
and a fool in motley saw her at the same moment and hurried to intercept
her, but with a slide which carried him a quarter of the way across the
floor the Bedouin arrived first, and before the others had come up he
was drifting away with her in the tide of the dancers.

"Allah is good to me--Flamencine," whispered the camel-driver as he drew
her close to avoid a careless dancer.

"Why, Flamencine?" demanded a carefully altered voice, from which,
however, the music had not been eliminated.

"Don't you remember?" The Arab stole a covert, identifying glance down
at the tip of one ear which showed under its masking of brown hair--an
ear that looked as though it were chiseled from the pink coral of
Capri. He quoted:

"'There was a gipsy maiden within the forest green,
There was a gipsy maiden who shook a tambourine.
The stars of night had not the face,
The woodland wind had not the grace,
Of Flamencine.'"

Then the music stopped, and with its silencing came the monk, the clown,
the grandee, and others.

In the insistent demand of the many the Arab had too few dances with the
Spanish girl. There were Comanches, Samurai, policemen, Zulus and
courtiers, who, seeing her dance, discovered that their immediate
avocation was dancing with her.

Yet it wanted an hour of unmasking time when a Bedouin led a gipsy
maiden from Andalusia into the deserted library, where the darkness was
broken only by blazing logs on an