ench for being brave, and thought it very sensible that they should
be mercenary. For there was nothing that Zahara wanted of the world
that money could not obtain (or so she believed), and she knew no higher
philosophy than the quest of happiness. Because others did not seem to
share this philosophy she often wondered if she could be unusual. She
had come to the conclusion that she was ignorant. If only Harry Grantham
would talk to her she felt sure he could teach her so much.

There were so many things that puzzled her. She knew that at twenty-four
she was young for a French girl, although as an Egyptian she would
have been considered old. She had been taught that gold was the key to
happiness and that man was the ogre from whom this key must be wheedled.
A ready pupil, Zahara had early acquired the art of attracting, and now
at twenty-four she was a past mistress of the Great Craft, and as her
mirror told her, more beautiful than she had ever been.

Therefore, what did Agapoulos see in Safiyeh?

It was a problem which made Zahara's head ache. She could not understand
why as her power of winning men increased her power to hold them
diminished. Safiyeh was a mere inexperienced child--yet Agapoulos
had brought her to the house, and Zahara, wise in woman's lore, had
recognized the familiar change of manner.

It was a great problem, the age-old problem which doubtless set the
first silver thread among Phryne's red-gold locks and which now brought
a little perplexed wrinkle between Zahara's delicately pencilled brows.

It had not always been so. In those early days in Cairo there had been
an American boy. Zahara had never forgotten. Her beauty had bewildered
him. He had wanted to take her to New York; and oh! how she had wanted
to go. But her mother, who was then alive, had held other views, and he
had gone alone. Heavens! How old she felt. How many had come and gone
since that Egyptian winter, but now, although admiration was fatally
easy to win how few were so sincere as that fresh-faced boy from beyond
the Atlantic.

Zahara, staring into the mirror, observed that there was not a wrinkle
upon her face, not a flaw upon her perfect skin. Nor in this was she
blinded by vanity. Nature, indeed, had cast her in a rare mould, and
from her unusual hair, which was like dull gold, to her slender ankles
and tiny feet, she was one of the most perfectly fashioned human beings
who ever added to the beauty of the world.

Yet Aga