work, but the women gay in shawls and beads and shiny combs. Andrea was
there and bent forward until Jeff should recognise him, and again Jeff
realised that smiles lit up the place for him. Even the murmured name
ran round among the rows. They were telling one another, here was The
Prisoner. Whatever virtue there was in being a prisoner, it had earned
him adoring friends.

He sat there wondering over it, and conventional Addington came in
behind and took the vacant places. Jeff was glad not to be among them.
He didn't want their sophisticated views. This wasn't a pageant for
critical comment. It was Miss Amabel's pathetic scheme for bringing the
East and the West together and, in an exquisite hospitality, making the
East at home.

But when the curtain went up, he opened his eyes to the scene and
ceased thinking of philanthropy and Miss Amabel. Here was beauty, the
beauty of grace and traditionary form. They were dancing the tarantella.
Jeff had seen it in Italy, more than one night after the gay little
dinners Esther had loved to arrange when they were abroad. She had
refused all the innocent bohemianisms of foreign travel; she had taken
her own atmosphere of expensive conventionalities with her, and they had
seen Europe through that medium. In all their travelling they had never
touched racial intimacies. They were like a prince and princess convoyed
along in a royal progress, seeing only what is fitting for royal eyes to
see. The tarantella then was no more than an interlude in a play.
To-night it was no such spectacle. Jeff, who had a pretty imagination of
his own, felt hot waves of homesickness for the beauties of foreign
lands, and yet not those lands as he had seen them unrolled for the
perusal of the traveller. He sat in a dream of the heaven of beauty that
lies across the sea, and he felt toward the men who had left it to come
here to better themselves a compassion in the measure of his compassion
for himself. How bare his own life had been, even when the world opened
before him her illuminated page! He had not really enjoyed these
exquisite delights of hers; he had not even prepared himself for
enjoying. He had kept his eyes fixed on the game that ensures mere
luxury, and he had let Esther go out into the market and buy for them
both the only sort of happiness her eyes could see. He loved this
dancing rout. He envied these boys and girls their passion and facility.
They were, the most ignorant of them, of anot