he full force of the storm crashed about Jill's defenceless head
at the midday hour also of the same day, when she ought to have been
searching the coolness of her midday sleeping chamber, and
forgetfulness of the last few hours in sleep.

Not quite defenceless was she, however, as she sat back in the chair,
her eyes ablaze and her veil torn to shreds at her feet, ripping the
moral atmosphere with words which seemed to have been dipped in some
corrosive verbal fluid. She was angry, hurt, and deathly tired, and
was doing her best to pass some of her mental suffering anyway on to
the man who leant with folded arms against the cedar wall.

The inevitable crisis had come!

The independence of Western womanhood had clashed with the Eastern
ideas on the privacy and seclusion of the gentler sex. Jill simply
could _not_ understand that there was any cause for the terrible
jealousy which had suddenly blazed up in the Arab when she had
innocently repeated her request to be allowed to see her old friend;
Hahmed was as incapable of understanding the request, having failed in
his sojourn in the West to fully realise the everyday kind of jolly,
good, frank camaraderie which can exist between certain types of
English man and woman.

Half a word of tenderness, half a gesture of love, and she would have
been sobbing or laughing happily in his arms, but like a prairie fire
before the wind, the terrible Eastern rage was blazing through the man,
too fierce, too terrific to allow him to analyse the situation, or
remember that the upbringing of his girl-wife had been totally
different to that of the women of his country.

Jill suddenly sat forward, clasping one slim ankle across her knee in a
slim hand, a position she knew perfectly well would rouse Hahmed to a
frenzy, and spoke slowly and mockingly in English instead of the pretty
lisping Arabic which always entranced him.

"You may lecture, and remonstrate, and admonish, which all comes to the
same thing, until night falls, but you will never make me see eye to
eye with you in _this_. It is simply _absurd_ to threaten that you
will shut me in my apartments until I learn reason. If you lock me in,
or place guards about me, I will jump from the roof and gain my freedom
by breaking my neck. Why Jack Wetherbourne--oh------"

Hahmed had leant forward, and gripping her by the shoulders had very
suddenly, and not over gently, jerked her to her feet, holding her by
the strength of his