indow, splash the bones of men. I gathered up my
skirts to run toward other shelter, but she was before me, saying in her
strange experimental voice that word of hers: "_Come_."

She ran in advance, and I, with the outer robe over my head, followed,
urging flinching way against the whipped rain-wash. She took the way by
the stone horse-pond, through an alley to the left between two blind
walls, then down a steep path through wood to the rock-steps, and up we
ran, and along the hill, to her yali, which is a mile nearer the village
than the palace, though by the time we pelted into its dry shelter we
were wet to the skin.

Sudden darkness had come, but she quickly found some matches, lit one,
looking at it with a certain meditative air, and applied it to a candle
and to a bronze Western lamp on the table, which I had taught her to oil
and light. Near a Western fire-place was a Turkish mangal, like one
which she had seen me light to warm bath-waters in Constantinople, and
when I pointed to it, she ran to the kitchen, returned with some chopped
wood, and very cleverly lit it. And there for several hours I sat that
night, reading (the first time for many years): it was a book by the
poet Milton, found in a glazed book-case on the other side of the
fire-place: and most strange, most novel, I found those august words
about warring angels that night, while the storm raved: for this man had
evidently taken no end of pains with his book, and done it gallantly
well, too, making the thing hum: and I could not conceive why he should
have been at that trouble--unless it were for the same reason that I
built the palace, because some spark bites a man, and he would be
like--but that is all vanity, and delusion.

Well, there is a rage in the storms of late years which really
transcends bounds; I do not remember if I have noted it in these sheets
before: but I never could have conceived a turbulence so huge. Hour
after hour I sat there that night, smoking a chibouque, reading, and
listening to the batteries and lamentations of that haunted air,
shrinking from it, fearing even for the _Speranza_ by her quay in the
sequestered harbour, and for the palace-pillars. But what astonished me
was that girl: for, after sitting on the ottoman to my left some time,
she fell sideways asleep, not the least fear about her, though I should
have thought that nervousness at such a turmoil would be so natural to
her: and whence she has this light confide