ss,
whereupon she clapped her hands quickly.

CHAPTER XX

Jill had finished the first of many evening meals she was to partake of
in the desert, and was lying on a heap of cushions listening to the
clink of brass coffee utensils and porcelain cups, whilst sniffing
appreciatively the aroma of Eastern coffee Easternly made, which is
totally different to that which permeates the dim recesses draped with
tinselled dusty hangings, and cluttered with Eastern stools and tables
inlaid with mother o' pearl made in Birmingham, in the ubiquitous
Oriental Cafe at which we meet the rest of us at eleven o'clock on
Saturday morning at the seaside; nor does it resemble in the slightest
that which is oilily poured forth in London town by the fat, oily,
so-called "Son of the Crescent" who, wearing fez and baggy trousers, in
some caravanserai West, Sou'-west or Nor'-west, has unfailingly been
chief coffee-maker to the late Sultan, _vide_ anyway the hotel
advertisements.

She was smiling as she lay stretched full length with her chin in her
palms, thinking of the meal just eaten. Whilst waiting for it she had
imagined a mess of pottage perhaps, or stewed kid as _piece de
resistance_, with honey or manna as sweets, and a savoury of fried
locusts, which she, with many others, imagined to be the all-devouring
insect. She knew by now, and returned thanks, that the man neither ate
with his mouth open nor gave precedence to his fingers and teeth over
knives and forks, but in her wildest dreams she had never imagined that
such exquisite things, served in such an exquisite way, could be laid
before her in a desert.

When the light had suddenly closed down upon the two adventurers on the
Road of Life, she had been led to the tent adjoining hers, a sudden
shyness preventing her from asking where the Arab slept, which she
found alight with the soft glow of many candles, and spread with a
carpet upon which were many cushions. The table had certainly been the
ground, but everything upon it had been of the daintiest, and all that
she had eaten, although she had had no notion of what it had consisted,
might have been the outcome of some _cordon bleu's_ genius.

"Our life is one long picnic," had replied the Arab to her question
anent the cooking facilities in waste places. "So why should we not
all, high and low born, learn to make the picnic pleasant, for behold,
we know not what a day may bring forth, nor in what place the night
shall