ng against the walls of underground caverns. It made her
hear the wild, fierce love-call of a desert bird to its mate.

She could bear it no longer. She sprang up, her eyes shining, her cheeks
red. "May I dance for you to that music, Lella Alonda?" she said to the
Agha's wife. "I think I could. I long to try."

Lella Alonda, who was old, and accustomed only to the dancing of the
Almehs, which she thought shameful, was scandalized at the thought that
the young girl would willingly dance before men. She was dumb, not
knowing what answer to give, that need not offend a guest, but which
might save the Roumia from indiscretion.

The Agha, however, was enchanted. He was a man of the world still,
though he was aged now, and he had been to Paris, as well as many times
to Algiers. He knew that European ladies danced with men of their
acquaintance, and he was curious to see what this beautiful child wished
to do. He glanced at Maieddine, and spoke to his wife: "Tell the little
White Rose to dance; that it will give us pleasure."

"Dance then, in thine own way, O daughter," Lella Alonda was forced to
say; for it did not even occur to her that she might disobey her
husband.

Victoria smiled at them all; at M'Barka and Aichouch, and Aichouch's
dignified husband, Si Abderrhaman: at Alonda and the Agha, and at
Maieddine, as, when a child, she would have smiled at her sister, when
beginning a dance made up from one of Saidee's stories.

She had told Stephen of an Eastern dance she knew, but this was
something different, more thrilling and wonderful, which the wild music
put into her heart. At first, she hardly knew what was the meaning she
felt impelled to express by gesture and pose. The spirit of the desert
sang to her, a song of love, a song old as the love-story of Eve; and
though the secret of that song was partly hidden from her as yet, she
must try to find it out for herself, and picture it to others, by
dancing.

Always before, when she danced, Victoria had called up the face of her
sister, to keep before her eyes as an inspiration. But now, as she bent
and swayed to catch the spirit's whispers, as wheat sways to the whisper
of the wind, it was a man's face she saw. Stephen Knight seemed to stand
in the tent, looking at her with a curiously wistful, longing look, over
the heads of the Arab audience, who sat on their low divans and piled
carpets.

She thrilled to the look, and the desert spirit made her screen her face