of a graceful and apparently
fatalistic languor, and fits of almost monkeylike gaiety and mischief
which Pierre strove to repress. A small Arab girl, dressed like a little
woman in flowing cotton or muslin, with clinking bracelets and anklets,
charms on her thin bosom and scarlet and yellow silk handkerchiefs on
her braided hair, was also perpetually about the house and the
courtyard. Neither Charmian nor Claude ever quite understood what had
first led little Fatma there. She was some relation of Bibi's, had
always known La Grande Jeanne, and seemed in some vague way to belong to
the ancient house. Very soon they would have missed her had she gone.
She was gentle, dignified, eternally picturesque. The courtyard roofed
in by the bougainvillea would have seemed sad and deserted without her.

Charmian had come away from England with enthusiasm, intent on the
future. Till their departure life had been busy and complicated. She had
had a thousand things to do, quantities of people to see; friends to
whom she must say good-bye, acquaintances, dressmakers, modistes,
tailors. Claude had been busy, too. He had been working at his
orchestration for hours every day. Charmian had never interrupted him.
It was her role to keep him to his work if he showed signs of flagging.
But he had never shown such signs. London had hummed around them with
its thousand suggestive voices; hinting, as if without intention and
because it could not do otherwise, at a myriad interests, activities,
passions. The great city had kept their minds, and even, so it seemed to
Charmian and to Claude sometimes now in Africa, their hearts occupied.
Now they confronted a solitary life in a strange country, in a _milieu_
where they had no friends, no acquaintances even, except two or three
casually met in the Hotel St. George, and the British Consul-General and
his wife, who had been to call on them.

Quietude, a curious sort of emptiness, seemed to descend upon them
during those first days in the villa. Even Charmian felt rather "flat."
She was conscious of the romance of their situation in this old Arab
house, looking out over trees to the bright-blue sea. But when she had
carefully arranged and rearranged the furniture, settled on the places
for the books, put flowers in the vases, and had several talks with
Jeanne, she was acutely aware of a certain vagueness, a certain almost
overpowering oddity. She felt rather like a person who has done in a
great hurry s