taloons are cast
aside and I am young again with a glow in my heart which beats fast at
her beauty. I shut my teeth.

"No," said I to myself. "The curtain shall not rise on that farcical
tragedy again."

I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta's mule, which with its
companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.

"I think we had better ride on, Carlotta," I said. "Mount."

She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the saddle.

We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador. But each of us felt
that something had happened.

At dinner we met as usual. Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of our
travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an unprecedented
thirst for information. I never gave her historical instruction with
less zest.

After the meal we went onto the flat roof. Carlotta poured out my coffee
at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair which was my
accustomed seat. The starlit night was blue and languorous. From some
cafe came the monotonous strains of Moorish music, the harsh strings and
harsh men's voices softened by the distance. Carlotta took my coffee-cup
when I had finished and set it down in her granddaughterly way. Then she
stood in front of me.

"Won't you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous,
darling?"

I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down. I may observe
that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one and only chair
on the housetop.

"Tell me about the stars," she said.

I knew what she meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry,
obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to
her young imagination. She was passing through an exquisite phase of
development.

I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades. And I
told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who herself
was the daughter of the Sea, and how they were all pure maidens, save
one, and were the companions of Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was
afterwards slain by Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up
there in the sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the
gods for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and,
lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal, shrank
away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to the eye of man.

"She was ashamed," said Carlotta in a low voice, "because she loved some
one