by a Spahi, whose red jacket gleamed against the white coat
of his prancing stallion. Bugles sounded; bells rang; a donkey brayed
with dreary violence in a side street. Somewhere a mandoline was being
thrummed, and a very French voice rose above it singing a song of the
Paris pavements. In the large cafes just below the balcony where the two
women were standing crowds of people were seated at little tables,
sipping absinthe, vermouth, and bright-colored syrups. Among the
Europeans of various nations the dignified and ample figures of
well-dressed Arabs in pale blue, green, brown, and white burnouses, with
high turbans bound by ropes of camel's hair, stood out, the conquered
looking like conquerors.

"_Cirez! Cirez!"_ cried incessantly the Arab boot-polishers, who
scuffled and played tricks among themselves while they waited for
customers. "_Cirez, moosou! Cirez!_" Long wagons, loaded with stone from
the quarries of the Gorge, jangled by, some of them drawn by mixed teams
of eleven horses and mules, on whose necks chimed collars of bells.
Chauffeurs sounded the horns of their motors as they slowly crept
through the nonchalant crowd of natives, which had gathered in front of
the post-office and the Municipal Theater to discuss the affairs of the
day. Maltese coachmen, seated on the boxes of large landaus, cracked
their whips to announce to the Kabyle Chasseurs of the two hotels the
return of travellers from their excursions. Omnibuses rolled slowly up
from the station loaded with luggage, which was vehemently grasped by
native porters, brought to earth, and carried in with eager violence.
The animation of the city was intense, and had in it something barbaric
and almost savage, something that seemed undisciplined, bred of the
orange and red soil, of the orange and red rocks, of the snow and
sun-smitten mountains, of the terrific gorges and precipices which made
the landscape vital and almost terrible.

Yet in the evening light the distant slopes, the sharply cut silhouettes
of the hills, held a strange and exquisitely delicate serenity. The sky,
cloudless, shot with primrose, blue, and green, deepening toward the
West into a red that was flecked with gold, was calm and almost tender.
Nature showed two sides of her soul; but humanity seemed to respond only
to the side that was fierce and violent.

"What a setting for melodrama!" repeated Mrs. Shiffney.

She sighed. At that moment the presence of Henriette irritated her.