aid, Josette Soubise should ask embarrassing questions;
and the last hour of probation they gave to the old town. There, as they
stopped to look in at the workshops of the weavers, and the bakers, or
stared at the hands of Fatma-Zora painted in henna on the doors of Jews
and True Believers, crowds of ragged boys and girls followed them,
laughing and begging as gaily as if begging were a game. Only this band
of children, and heavily jewelled girls of Morocco or Spain, with
unveiled, ivory faces and eyes like suns, looked at the Englishmen, as
Stephen and Nevill passed the isolated blue and green houses, in front
of which the women sat in a bath of sunshine. Arabs and Jews walked by
proudly, and did not seem to see that there were strangers in their
midst.

When at last it was time to go back to the hotel, and motor to the Ecole
Indigene, Josette was ready, plainly dressed in black. She introduced
her friends to the bride, Madame de Vaux, a merry young woman, blonde by
nature and art, who laughed always, like the children in the Arab town.
She admired Knight far more than Caird, because she liked tall, dark
men, her own husband being red and stout. Therefore, she would have been
delighted to play the tactful chaperon, if Josette had not continually
broken in upon her duet with Stephen, ordering them both to look at this
or that.

The country through which they drove after passing out of the gate in
the modern French wall, might have been the south of England in
midsummer, had it not been peopled by the dignified Arab figures which
never lost their strangeness and novelty for Stephen. Here, in the west
country, they glittered in finery like gorgeous birds: sky-blue jacket,
scarlet fez and sash glowing behind a lacework of green branches netted
with flowers, where a man hoed his fields or planted his garden.

Hung with a tapestry of roses, immense brown walls lay crumbling--ruined
gateways, and shattered traces of the triple fortifications which
defended Tlemcen when the Almohades were in power. By a clear rill of
water gushing along the roadside, a group of delicate broken arches
marked the tomb of the "flying saint," Sidi Abou Ishad el Taiyer, an
early Wright or Bleriot who could swim through the air; and though in
his grave a chest of gold was said to be buried, no one--not even the
lawless men from over the border--had ever dared dig for the treasure.
Close by, under the running water, a Moor had found a huge lump of