een more than mortal if
he had not been tolerably confident of "killing," and luxuriously
practised in that pleasant pastime. That if he could once get the
antelope eyes to look at him, they would look lovingly before long, he
was in comfortable security; but how to get into a presence, which it
was death for an unbeliever and a male creature to approach, was a
knottier question, and the difficulty absorbed him. There were several
rather telling Englishwomen out there, with whom he had flirted _faute
de mieux_, at the cavalry balls we managed to get up in Pera, at the
Embassy costume-ball, on board yacht-decks in the harbor, and in picnics
to Therapia or the Monastery. But they became as flavorless as
twice-told tales, and twice-warmed entremets, beside the new piquance,
the delicious loveliness, the divine difficulty of this captive
Circassian. That he had no more earthly business to covet her than he
had to covet the unlucky Turkish trader's lumps of lapis-lazuli and
agate, never occurred to him; the stones didn't tempt him, you see, but
the beauty did. That those rich, soft, unrivalled Eastern charms,
"merely born to bloom and drop," should be caged from the world and only
rejoice the eyes of a fat old opium-soddened Stamboul merchant, seemed a
downright reversal of all the laws of nature, a tampering with the
balance of just apportionment that clamored for redress; but, like most
other crying injustice, the remedy was hard to compass.

Day after day he rode down to the same place on the Sweet Waters on the
chance of the caique's passing; and, sure enough, the caique did pass
nine times out of ten, and, when opportunity served for such a hideous
Oriental crime not to be too perilous, the silver gauze floated aside
unveiling a face as fair as the morning, or, when that was impossible,
the eyes turned on him shyly and sadly in their lustrous appeal, as
though mutely bewailing such cruel captivity. Those eyes said as plainly
as language could speak that the lovely Favorite plaintively resisted
her bondage, and thought the Frank with his long fair beard, and his six
feet of height, little short of an angel of light, though he might be an
infidel.

Given--hot languid days, nothing to do, sultry air heavy with orange and
rose odors, and those "silent passages," repeating themselves every time
that Leilah Derran's caique glided past the myrtle screen, where her
Giaour lay _perdu_, the result is conjectural: though they had