ts, who gladly gave her permission to show
Charmian everything. After wandering through the house, which was a pure
gem of Arab architecture, five hundred years old, and in excellent
preservation, they descended into the garden, which was on the slope of
the hill over which the houses of Mustapha Superieur are scattered. Here
no sounds of voices reached them, no tram bells, no shrieks from motors
buzzing along the white road high above them. The garden was large and
laid out with subtle ingenuity. The house was hidden away from the world
that was so near.

Miss Fleet strolled on, descending by winding paths, closely followed by
Charmian, till she came to a sheet of artificial water, whose uneven
banks were covered with masses of azaleas, rhododendrons, bamboos, and
flowering shrubs. In the midst of this lake there was a tiny island,
just big enough to give room for the growth of one gigantic date palm,
and for a mass of arum lilies from which it rose towering toward the
delicate blue of the cloudless sky. The lilies and the palm--they were
the island, round which slept greenish-yellow water guarded by the
azaleas, the rhododendrons, the bamboos, and the shrubs. And on the path
where Charmian and Miss Fleet stood there was a long pergola of roses,
making a half-moon.

Charmian stood still and looked. The ground formed a sort of basin
sheltering the little lake. Even the white Arab house was hidden from it
by a screen of trees. The island, a wonderfully clever thing, attained
by artificiality a sort of strange exoticism which almost intoxicated
Charmian. Perhaps nothing wholly natural could have affected her in
quite the same way. There was something of the art of a Ferdinand Rades
in the art which had created that island, had set it just where it was.
It had been planned to communicate a thrill to highly civilized people,
to suggest to them--what? the Fortunate Isles, perhaps, the strange
isles, which they dream of when they have a moment to dream, but which
they will certainly never see. It was a suggestive little isle. One
longed to sail away, to land on it--and then?

Charmian stood as if hypnotized by it. Her eyes went from the lilies up
the great wrinkled trunk of the palm to its far away tufted head, then
travelled down to the big white flowers. She sighed and gazed. And just
at that moment she felt that she was going to tell Susan Fleet
immediately.

On the shore of the lake there was a seat.

"I must tell y