mean to stop?" Stephen asked, surprised that the car went on.

"No; school's begun. We'll have to wait till the noon interval, and even
then we shan't be allowed indoors, for a good many of the girls are over
twelve, the age for veiling--_hadjabah_, they call it--when they're shut
up, and no man, except near relations, can see their faces. Several of
the girls are already engaged. I believe there's one, not fourteen,
who's been divorced twice, though she's still interested in dolls.
Weird, isn't it? Josette will talk with us in the garden. But we'll
have time now to take rooms at the hotel and wash off the dust. To eat
something too, if you're hungry."

But Stephen was no hungrier than Nevill, whose excitement, perhaps, was
contagious.

The hotel was in a wide _place_, so thickly planted with acacias and
chestnut trees as to resemble a shabby park. An Arab servant showed them
to adjoining rooms, plain but clean, and a half-breed girl brought tins
of hot water and vases of syringas. As for roses, she said in hybrid
French, no one troubled about them--there were too many in Tlemcen. Ah!
but it was a land of plenty! The gentlemen would be happy, and wish to
stay a long time. There was meat and good wine for almost nothing, and
beggars need not ask twice for bread--fine, white bread, baked as the
Moors baked, across the border.

As they bathed and dressed more carefully than they had dressed for the
early-morning start, strange sounds came up from the square below, which
was full of people, laughing, quarrelling, playing games, striking
bargains, singing songs. Arab bootblacks clamoured for custom at the
hotel-door, pushing one another aside, fiercely. Little boys in
embroidered green or crimson jackets sat on the hard, yellow earth,
playing an intricate game like "jack stones," and disputed so violently
that men and even women stopped to remonstrate, and separate them; now a
grave, prosperous Jew dressed in red (Jewish mourning in the province of
Oran); then an old Kabyle woman of the plains, in a short skirt of fiery
orange scarcely hiding the thin sticks of legs that were stained with
henna half-way up the calves, like painted stockings. Moors from across
the frontier--fierce men with eagle faces and striped cloaks--grouped
together, whispering and gesticulating, stared at with suspicion by the
milder Arabs, who attributed all the crimes of Tlemcen to the wild men
from over the border. Black giants from the Negro qua