those instincts
of the senses that are ever clamouring after the new and the
unknown. Nature is ever driving us on to seek new mates. The mind
with its trammels of affection, gratitude, pity, consideration, is
ever dragging us back and seeking to tie us to the old. Nature's
rule is fresh seasons, fresh mates, new hours, new loves. And he
who seeks fidelity must woo the mind, for the body cannot give it,
and knows not its laws.

After a minute's silence Ahmed stretched out his hand to her and
raised her to her feet. His face had lost its smiles and fire; it
was grave and sombre-looking now, but his voice was gentle as he
answered her:

"You are free to return to the haremlik," he said; "no one has any
power to coerce you. I wish you to come and go as you will." He
waved his hand towards the curtain with a gesture of dismissal, and
then turned away and rang a little silver bell on a table. The
black slave appeared--it seemed almost instantly--before the
curtain; while Dilama still stood, motionless, irresolute, with a
curious sense of disappointment, mingling with relief, stealing
over her. Ahmed beckoned the slave to him, and said something
in a low voice Dilama did not catch, but the last sentence she
overheard. "Send Soutouma to me," and without taking any further
notice of Dilama, Ahmed turned back towards the divan, threw
himself upon it, and drew the pipe-stand towards him.

The black slave, with a smile on her curving lips, motioned to
Dilama to precede her, and Dilama, with one look flung backward to
Ahmed's couch in the full sunlight of the window, passed under the
heavy blue curtain out into the passage. "Send Soutouma to me!" the
words went through her with a cutting feeling, as a knife dividing
her flesh.

Soutouma was next to Buldoula in age and rank--a fair beauty of the
harem, with soft, long, sunlit tresses, and a skin of snow.

"Yes, why not? why not?" asked Dilama wildly to herself as her feet
dragged along down the passage side by side with the grinning
black's. "I am a Druze girl: I belong to Murad and to the
mountains." But the insidious charm of Ahmed's personality worked
on all the pulses of her body; pulses that know not fidelity,
though her brain kept telling her that Murad would be waiting for
her in the garden. But that night Murad did not come. The garden
stood cool and fragrant, full of perfume and rosy light, full of
the music of birds and the tints of a thousand flowers--all the
in