ded Safti with a slight yawn.

"How do you know?"

"When the African is in love he plays upon the pipe. That is what they
say in the Sahara."

"And you think he is alone under some palm-tree playing for himself?"

"Yes; he is quite alone. If he is much in love he will play all day,
and, perhaps, all night too."

"But she cannot hear him."

"That does not matter. He plays for his own heart, and his own heart can
hear."

I listened. Since Safti had spoken the music meant more to me. I
tried to read the player's heart in the endless song it made. Trills,
twitterings, grace notes, little runs upward ending in the air--surely
it was a boy's heart, and not unhappy.

"It is coming nearer," I said.

"Yes. Ah, it is Smain!"

Safti's one eye is sharp. I had seen no one. But as he spoke a tall
youth in a single white garment glided into my view, his eyes bent
down, his brown fingers fluttering on a long reed flute covered with red
arabesques. His feet were bare, and he moved slowly.

Safti hailed him with the accented violence peculiar to the Arabs. He
stopped playing, looked, and smiled all over his young face. In a moment
he was on our side of the earth wall, and talking busily, staring at
me the while with unabashed curiosity. For few strangers come to
Sidi-Amrane, and Smain had never wandered far.

"What does he say?" I asked of Safti.

"I tell him we shall be at Touggourt tomorrow night, and shall stay
there a week. He answers that his heart is there with Oreida."

"What! Does his lady-love live at Touggourt?"

"Yes; she is a dancer."

Smain smiled. He did not understand French, but he knew we were speaking
of his love affair, and he was not afflicted with shyness. As he
accompanied us to the village he played again, and I read his nature in
the soft sounds of his flute.

All that day he stayed with us, and nearly all that day he played. Even
when he guided me through the village, where, between terraced houses,
pretty children--the girls in deep purple, with yellow flowers stuck in
their left nostrils, the boys in white--danced with a boisterous grace
round brushwood fires, his flute was at his lips, and his fingers
fluttered ceaselessly. And as night drew on the music was surely more
amorous, and I seemed to see Oreida drawing near over the sands.

Smain was but sixteen, tall and slim as a reed, with a poetic face and
lustrous, languid eyes. I imagined Oreida a child too--one of those
flowers of the