me was Hamoud-bin-Said. He was an Oman Arab from Zanzibar.

Parr had found him in a Turkish cafe in Washington Street, oppressed by
the weight of successive misfortunes, and by that sense of fatality
which benumbs the Arab of vitiated stock. For little by little the
soft, moist airs of Zanzibar had corroded the spirit of the Oman Arabs,
who had sailed thither, in the old days, from their own rugged land, in
great fierceness and ruthlessness, unconquered by men, and incapable of
foreseeing that some day they would be vanquished by perfumed breezes.
As for Hamoud-bin-Said, he was typical of his kind to-day in that humid
paradise, where want of energy, and lack of discipline or any
well-defined purpose, affected even the young.

"As you see him, ma'am, he's down on his luck. But I think he has
seen----"

The young Arab remained impassive, erect, as handsome as a faintly
tinted statue of Pride, yet pathetic in his salt-and-pepper suit. And
Lilla, despite his costume and his errand, divined in him a certain
subtle relationship to herself, received an impression of
"aristocratic" feeling perhaps derived from a consciousness of superior
birth and fortune. Parr need not have told her--especially in so
audible a stage whisper--that the stranger had "seen better days."

"You speak English?" she inquired.

The Arab's limpid eyes were slowly infused with light. His clear-cut
carnelian lips started apart; but he did not answer until the last
vibrations of her voice had died away, like the echo of a silver bell
in a landscape that one had believed to be empty of human life. In a
low, grave, muffled tone, he said:

"A little. Enough, perhaps, madam, I hope."

And after a moment, though his face did not change, he gave a sharp
sigh, somehow the last thing that one had expected from him.

All at once as she stared at him she had a feeling of unreality. Why
were they three standing here? A whim, transformed into a command by a
vision of a Saharan coffee house, had materialized this abjectly
clothed young human exotic in the midst of the blue-and-white Delia
Robbias! But she had a feeling that she had stood here before with
him, or else had dreamed of this, perhaps, in one of those
psychopathological moments that have a prophetic quality. This
sensation of recurrence--or else, this impression of the
unavoidable--gave her a twinge of awe. Was everything, even a baggy
young teacher of Arabic, foreordained? "Am I," she