visit his other
wives, nor send for Dilama, though his eyes, like the others, noted
her growing beauty day by day.

"I will wait in patience," he thought, looking out one morning at
sunrise, and watching Dilama playing with the white doves on the
basin edge of the fountain. "I will wait till Buldoula is well and
strong again. She would fret now, and think I was forgetting her in
a new love if I call Dilama to me yet. I will wait till her second
son is born, and then in her joy and pride she will not be jealous
of the new wife."

So he waited, but in the game of love he that waits is ever the
loser. That night, when the moon was rising over the white and deep
green of Damascus, Dilama walked, humming to herself, in the
garden, full of a great leaping desire, born of her youth and fine
health and the breath of the May night, to love and be loved.
Suddenly, when she came to the corner, under the drooping boughs of
the grove without the garden, an orange fell, and, just escaping
her head struck her heavily on her bosom. With a great shock she
stood still, looking up, and there, on the summit of the high wall,
amid the green boughs, was a man sitting, leaning over down towards
her, with fiery eyes looking upon her from under a dark green
turban.

"It is death to be here," she whispered, her face pallid in the
moonlight, "do not stay;" yet her whole being leapt up with hope
that he would disobey. The man laughed softly.

"It is life to look on you," he said merely, and to her terrified
joy and horrified delight he slid down between the lemon-trees and
the wall, and stood before her in the angle it made, where two
buttresses jutting forward hid him from all view unless one stood
directly opposite.

Dilama shook from head to foot; in one fierce, sweeping rush,
love passed over and through her as she stood staring with wild
dilated eyes on the form before her. Tall, tall as Ahmed, with
all the grace and strength of youth, lithe and supple, with a
straight-lined, dark-browed face above a stately throat, and dark
kindling eyes, wells of living fire that called all her soul and
heart and womanhood into life.

"I have often watched you walking in the garden," he murmured,
gently taking in his, one nerveless hand. "I come from your village
in the hills, where you were taken from long ago. I am a Druze,"
and he threw his head higher, as the stag of the forest throws his
at the first note of the challenge. Dilama knew well t