, Arlee found she was
looking down into a long and spacious hall, lined with delicate
columns bearing beautiful, pointed arches, and brilliant with old
gilding and inlay.

This was the colonnade which she had seen forming one side of the
court; it was the hall of banquets, she was told, and connected this
wing of the palace, the _haremlik_, with the _selamlik_, the men's
wing, across the way. Here in old times the lord of the palace gave
his feasts, and this nook had been built for some favorite to view
the revels.

Arlee stared down into the great empty hall with an involuntary
quickening of the breath. How desolate it was, but how beautiful in
its desolation! What strange revels had taken place there to the
notes of wild music, what girls had danced, what voices had shouted,
what moods had been indulged! She thought of the men who had made
merry there ... and then she thought of the women, generations of
women, who had stood where she was standing, pressing their young
faces against the grill, their bright eyes peering, peering down.
She felt their soft little silken ghosts all about her, their
bangles clinking, their perfumes enveloping her sense--lovely little
painted dolls, their mimic passions helpless in their hearts....

Dreaming, she turned and in silence retraced her way after her
hostess, loitering by the window in the anteroom to watch a veiled
girl drawing water at the old well in the center, an old well rich
in arabesques.

How much happier, thought Arlee, were these serving maids in the
freedom of their poverty than the cloistered aristocrats behind
their darkened windows. She wondered if that strange figure beside
her, half Moslem, half modern, envied the little maid the saucy jest
which she flung at a bare-footed boy idling beside a dozing white
donkey. As she watched the old-world quiet of the picture was
broken. Some one, the doorkeeper, she thought, from his vivid robes
and yellow shoes, came running across the court, shouting something
at the girl which sent her flying to the house, her jar forgotten,
and another man, an enormous Nubian with blue Turkish bloomers,
short red jacket and a red fez, hurried across the court toward the
_haremlik_.

The lady stepped toward the screening and called down; the man
stopped, raised his head, and shouted back a jargon of excited
gutturals, waving his arms in vehement gesturing. His mistress
interrupted with a brief question, then with another, then nodd