ed me! at once! come!--I am not forgotten."

As in the glorious moment of victory, her bloodless face was overspread
with a dazzling expression of joy. Boldly raising her head and inviting
his glances as she had braved them, she listened, with glowing eyes,
drinking each word that flowed from his lips, her nostrils distended as
if to scent the approach of an Oriental perfume, to the recital of the
narrative commenced by the duke in a measured, cajoling tone, which grew
animated and louder.

Everybody listened to Rosas. Only the slight fluttering of fans was
heard like a beating of wings. Without changing the tone of his
discourse, and recounting his travels to his audience as if he were
addressing only Marianne, he told in a voice more Italian than Spanish,
in musical, non-guttural cadences, of his experiences on the borders of
the Nile, of the weariness of the caravans, of the nights passed under
star-strewn skies, of the songs of the camel-driver, slowly intoned like
prayers, of the gloom of solitary wastes and of the poetic associations
of the ruins slumbering amid the red sands of the desert. At times he
recited a translation of an Arabian song or remarked in passing, on some
mournful ballad, refined as a Sennett, deep as the infinite, in which
the eternal words of love, tender and affecting in all languages,
assumed an intensely poetic character under the influence of their
Semitic nature; songs in which passers-by, strangers, lovers dead for
centuries, who had strewed, as it were, their joys and their sobs over
the sands of the desert, told the color of the hair and of the eyes of
their dear ones, pleaded with their betrothed dead for the alms of love,
and promised to spectres of women rose-colored garments and flowers that
time would never wither.

These songs of Arabs dying for Nazarenes, of sons of Mohammed
sacrificing themselves for the daughters of Aissa were so translated by
this Castilian that the exquisite charm of the original, filtered
through his rendering, lost none,--even in French,--of the special
characteristics of his own nation, a half-daughter of the Orient. And
inevitably, with its melancholy repetition, the poetry he spoke of dwelt
on wounded, suffering love, on the anguish of timid hearts, and the sobs
of unknown despairing Arabs, buried for ages under the sands of the
desert.

The duke seemed to take pleasure in dwelling on these poetic quotations
rather than on the reminiscences of his t