in fact, with my habit
of putting the telescope to my blind eye, I obstinately had refused
to foresee. During our wanderings I had watched the flowering of her
splendid beauty as she drank in health from the glow of her own Orient.
I had noted the widening of her intellect, the quickening of her
sympathies. I had been conscious of the expansion of her soul in the
great silences when the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand. But
a growing wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her
glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of grief
for the child that had gone--into this, if I did remark it, I did
not choose to inquire. Instead, I continued my study of Arabic and
cultivated the acquaintance of a learned Moor whose conversation
afforded--and still affords--me peculiar pleasure. One of these days I
shall make a book of his Table-talk. But now I have to tell of Carlotta.

She accepted with alacrity my proposal that morning to ride over to the
Palm Tree House for luncheon, as we had done several times before. To
please me, I think, she had resolutely overcome her natural indolence.
So much so that she had come to love the nomad life of steamers and
caravans, and had grown restless, eager for fresh scenes, craving
new impressions. It was I who had cried a halt at Mogador where this
furnished house to let, belonging to a German merchant absent in Europe,
tempted me to rest awhile. I am not so young as Carlotta, and I awakened
to the fact of a circumambient universe so many years ago that I have
grown slumberous. Carlotta, if left to herself, would have gone on
riding camels through Africa to the end of time. She had changed in many
essentials. Instead of regarding me as an amiable purveyor of sweetmeats
and other necessaries of life to which by the grace of her being
Carlotta she was entitled, she treated me with human affection and
sympathy, keeping her own wants in the background, anxious only to
anticipate mine. But she still loved sweetmeats and would eat horrible
Moorish messes with an avidity only equalled by my repugnance. She
was still the same Carlotta. On the other hand again, she had of late
abandoned her caressing habits. If she laid her hand on my arm, she did
it timorously--whereat I would laugh and she would grow confused. Once
she had driven me to frenzy with her fondling. Those days had passed.
I told myself that I was as old as the sphinx we had moralised over in
Eg