timations of hidden and
inexhaustible treasure.

Thus Hughie's music; and presently Pearl floated out. She had changed
her Spanish costume for the one of scarlet crepe in which Hanson had
first seen her, a crown of scarlet flowers on her dark hair. Her very
expression, too, had changed, her eyes were elongated, her features
seemed delicately Egyptian; the brooding sphynx look was on her face.

"She's great, ain't she?" asked Bob Flick.

Seagreave nodded. He had never seen her superior in technique. It took
character, he appreciated that, to have endured the years of tiresome,
mechanical practice, and to have undertaken it so intelligently that she
had achieved her marvelous results; and she had, beside, youth and
beauty and magnetism. All this alone would have made her a great dancer,
but as he recognized, she had more, much more to bring to her art; a
complex nature which, in its unsounded depths ever held a vision of
beauty, and a sense of this vision which amounted to unity with it, and
therefore gave her the power of expressing it. Her mind, too, was
plastic to all primitive impulses and to Nature; she blended with it.
She was but little influenced by persons, her will was too dominating,
her intelligence too quick, and--but here his analysis ceased.

The Pearl was dancing to Hugh's strange music, she was dancing the
desert for him--Seagreave. He knew it was for him, although she never
glanced in his direction. And as she danced, he grew to realize that
this feat was not an intellectual one. She was not portraying the spirit
of the desert as gleaned from study and observation and melted in the
crucible of her poetic imagination and molded by her fancy until it was
a thing of form in her thought. The Black Pearl danced the desert
because in her was the power to be one with it and live in its life
through every cell of her being. It was a matter of feeling with her,
one phase of her affinity with the forces of earth; but because she had
the artist's constructive imagination, she could put it into form and
dance it, and by projecting her own feeling into it, convey it to
others.

The world with its round of outworn, hackneyed appeals, its wearisome
repetitions of crude and commonplace joys, its tawdry and limited
temptations, had long ago fallen away from Seagreave--and left him
nothing, but to-night a voice that he had long ignored, the voice of
life, commanded him.

"If the desert seems forever to claim her ow