he lawyer; "but I should like to be known as the best
player of Napoleon solitaire."

A sabre-hilt rapped on the door.

"Enter," cried the commandant.

The door opened, and there entered first the sharp cries of the mob,
and then the corporal, Abdullah, a woman clothed all in white, the
_oukil_, and, last of all, Mirza. The moment she was within the room
she dominated it. The other occupants were blotted out by comparison.
She entered, debonair, smiling, and, as she crossed the threshold, she
flung up her hand in a military salute.

"Hail, my masters," she cried in Arabic. "Would you believe it? but
just now I was nearly robbed, before your windows, of merchandise that
cost me thirty ounces."

"Be good enough to speak French," said the commandant; "it is the
etiquette of the office."

"And to you?" exclaimed Mirza, in the speech of Paris, "to you, who
speak such charming Arabic. It was only last week, the evening you did
me the honor of supping with me, that Miriam--perhaps you will pay her
the compliment of remembering her--the little girl who played and
danced for you, and who, when you were going, hooked on your sword for
you, and gave you a light from her cigarette?--well, Miriam said, when
you were gone, 'It is a pity the gracious commandant speaks any
language save Arabic, he speaks that so convincingly.' What could you
have whispered to her, Monsieur le Commandant, as you left my poor
house?"

The commandant moved nervously in his chair and glanced out of the
corner of his eye at the lawyer, who had resumed his cards. Reassured
by the apparent abstraction of his friend, the commandant gathered
himself and essayed a pleasantry.

"I told her," he said, "that if she lived to be twice her age, she
might be half as beautiful as you."

Mirza made an exaggerated courtesy and threw a mocking kiss from her
finger-tips. "I thought," she said, "that a woman's age was something
that no well-bred Frenchman would speak of." Then she drew herself up
and her face, from mocking, became hard and cruel.

"I know," she said, slowly, "that I am old. I am eight-and-twenty. I
was a wife at twelve, and a mother at thirteen. Such matters are
ordered differently here, Monsieur. A girl is a woman before she has
had any childhood. I married Ilderhim. Of course, I had never seen him
until we stood before the cadi. I had the misfortune to bear him a
daughter, and he cursed me. When I was fourteen, a Russian Grand Duke
came to Bi