, and she had two female slaves.

Dicky Donovan was of that rare type of man who has the keenest desire to
know all things, good or evil, though he was fastidious when it came
to doing them. He had a gift of keeping his own commandments. If he
had been a six-footer and riding eighteen stone--if he hadn't been, as
Fielding often said, so "damned finicky," he might easily have come a
cropper. For, being absolutely without fear, he did what he listed and
went where he listed. An insatiable curiosity was his strongest point,
save one. If he had had a headache--though he never had--he would at
once have made an inquiry into the various kinds of headache possible to
mortal man, with pungent deductions from his demonstrations. So it was
that when he first saw a dancing-girl in the streets of Cairo he
could not rest until by circuitous routes he had traced the history of
dancing-girls back through the ages, through Greece and the ruby East,
even to the days when the beautiful bad ones were invited to the feasts
of the mighty, to charm the eyes of King Seti or Queen Hatsu.

He was an authority on the tribe of the Ghawazee, proving, to their
satisfaction and his own, their descent from the household of Haroon al
Rashid. He was, therefore, welcome among them. But he had found also,
as many another wise man has found in "furrin parts," that your greatest
safety lies in bringing tobacco to the men and leaving the women alone.
For, in those distant lands, a man may sell you his nuptial bed, but he
will pin the price of it to your back one day with the point of a lance
or the wedge of a hatchet.

Herebefore will be found the reason why Dicky Donovan--twenty-five and
no moustache, pink-cheeked and rosy-hearted, and "no white spots on his
liver"--went straight, that particular night, to the house of the chief
dancing-girl of Beni Hassan for help in his trouble. From her he had
learned to dance the dance of the Ghawazee. He had learned it so that,
with his insatiable curiosity, his archaeological instinct, he should be
able to compare it with the Nautch dance of India, the Hula-Hula of the
Sandwich Islanders, the Siva of the Samoans.

A half-hour from the time he set his foot in Beni Hassan two
dancing-girls issued from the house of the ghdzeeyeh, dressed in
shintiydn and muslin tarah, anklets and bracelets, with gold coins about
the forehead--and one was Dicky Donovan. He had done the rare thing: he
had trusted absolutely that class