seemed to
brand him where he sat. He looked about for his hat and some excuse that
would serve, and while he looked the sound of applause rose from the
house. It was a demonstration without great energy, hardly more than a
flutter from stall to stall, with a vague, fundamental noise from the
gallery; but it had the quality which acclaimed something new. Arnold
glanced at the stage and saw that while Pilate and the hollow-chested
slaves and the tin centurion were still on they had somehow lost
significance and colour, had faded into the impotent figures of a
tapestry, and that all the meaning and the dominance of the situation
had gathered into the person of a woman of the East who danced. She was
almost discordant in her literalness, in her clear olive tints and the
_kol_ smudges under her eyes, the string of coins in the mass of her
fallen hair, and her unfettered body. Beside her the slave-girls,
crouching, looked liked painted shells. She danced before Pilate in
strange Eastern ways, in plastic weavings and gesturings that seemed to
be the telling of a tale; and from the orchestra only one unknown
instrument sobbed out to help her. The women of the people have ever
bought in Palestine, buy to-day in the Mousky, the coarse, thick
grey-blue cotton that fell about her limbs, and there was audacity in
the poverty of her beaten silver anklets and armlets. These shone and
twinkled with her movements; but her softly splendid eyes and reddened
lips had the immobility of the bazaar. People looked at their playbills
to see whether it was really Hilda Howe or some nautch-queen borrowed
from a native theatre. By the time she sank before Pilate and placed his
foot upon her head a new spirit had breathed upon the house. Under the
unexpectedness of the representation it sat up straight, and there was a
keenness of desire to see what would happen next which plainly curtailed
the applause, as it does with the children at a pantomime.

"Have you ever seen anything like it before?" Alicia asked Captain
Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not nearly
so well done. Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene had begun to
use her arts upon Pilate in the well-known scene about which the
newspapers reported long afterwards how the Pope had declared that if
Miss Howe had not been a Protestant and so impervious he would have
excommunicated her--and as he looked his movement imperceptibly changed
to afford him a better