vitations to love, but love itself was absent. Dilama searched
the garden from end to end, and walked in and out among the roses
by the buttressed wall, but the garden was empty and silent. She
was alone. Tired at last, and ready to cry with fatigue and
disappointment, she sat down by the red brick wall, leaning her
chin on her hand and gazing up towards the windows of the Selamlik,
which could only be seen in portions here and there through a leafy
screen of plane-tree branches. How still it was in the garden, and
how the scent of the orange flower weighed on the senses! How clear
the pink, transparent air!

Through that same lucid air, under the spreading plane-trees, and
through the great dim bazaars of the city, walked Murad that
evening with quick, hot feet, and the liquid coursing in his veins
seemed fire instead of blood. He went from Druze to Druze, wherever
he could find them, in their own homes, or sitting at a shady
corner of a street, where the tiny rush-bottomed stools are
gathered round the tea-stalls with their hissing brazen urns and
porcelain cups, or lounging in the bazaars, or at the marble
drinking-fountains. Wherever they were he found them, and spoke a
few hot, eager words to them, urging them to hurry forward their
preparations, and be ready to start with the caravan at the rising
of the full moon. Then, as the rosy light changed into violet dusk,
he went home to his low, yellow, square-roofed dwelling on the edge
of the desert, and sat there in his one unlighted room--sat there
gazing out with unseeing eyes into the lustrous Damascus night
beyond the open door, and with the fingers of his right hand
playing absently with the handle of his knife.

A week had passed over and Ahmed had not sent again for Dilama, nor
had Murad visited the garden, and to the Eastern girl it seemed as
if the world had stopped still. The hot, languid days, the gorgeous
nights with the blaze of the stars and the rapture of the
nightingales, filled her with madness that seemed insupportable.
She knew of no reason for Murad's desertion. She could find out
nothing. She did not dare to breathe a word to any one of the
anxiety, the wonder, the desperation that seemed choking her. What
had become of him? What had happened? Would he ever come again? And
as he appealed only to her senses, and he was not there, she ceased
to wish for him very much, but thought more of Ahmed and the
Selamlik that were close to her. For the mind