open hearth.

When they were alone he turned to her anxiously. His voice was freighted
with appeal. Her face, now unmasked, wore an expression of stunned
misery.

"Dear," he asked, "how are you?"

She gazed at the flickering logs. "I should think you would know," she
answered wearily. Then, with a mirthless laugh, she spread both hands
toward the blaze. "I'm looking ahead--I can see it all there in the
fire." Her fingers convulsively clenched themselves until blue marks
showed against the pink palms.

He pushed a chair forward for her, but with a shake of her head she
declined it.

"Whoever heard of a gipsy girl sitting in a leather chair?" she
demanded. "It's more like--like some effete princess."

She dropped to the Persian rug and, gathering her knees between her
clasped hands, sat looking into the dying blaze. "For a few brief
minutes I am the gipsy girl," she added.

"And," he said, dropping cross-legged to the rug at her side, "when the
caravan halts at evening, and prayers have been said facing Mecca, and
the grunting camels kneel, to be unloaded, neither do we, the gipsies of
the desert, sit in chairs." He swayed slightly toward her, lowering his
voice to a whisper. As the soft touch of her shoulder brushed him and
electrified him, his cashmere-draped arms closed around her and held her
hungrily to him. The vagrant maiden of Andalusia and the caravan-driver
of Africa sat gazing together at the glowing pictures in the logs as
they turned slowly to ashes.

"Cara," he went on in a voice of pent-up earnestness, "we be nomads--we
two. 'The scarlet of the maples can shake us like the cry of bugles
going by.' Come away with me while there is time. Let us follow out our
destinies where gipsy blood calls us; in the desert, the jungle,
wherever you say. Let your fancy be our guide--your heart our compass.
Suppose"--he paused and, with one outstretched arm, pointed to the
fire--"suppose that to be a camp-fire--what do you see in the coals?"

"I have already told you," she said wearily. "I see a throne, a life
with all the confining littleness of a prison, with none of the breadth
of an empire. I see the sacrifice of all I love. I see year upon year of
purple desolation.... Purple is the color of mourning and royalty."

She fell silent, and he spoke slowly.

"I see the desert, many-hued, like an opal with the setting of the sun.
I see the flickering of camp-fires and the palm-fringe of an oasis. I
see the tape