upper classes, men who are seen at official receptions,
who go to the great balls at the smart hotels, and who slink in here
secretly night after night, mingle with the lowest riff-raff, to have
their dream beneath this blackened roof. There is one coming in now."

As he spoke, Mahmoud Baroudi appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in
native costume--very poorly dressed; wore a dingy turban, and a long
gibbeh of discoloured cloth. With the usual salaam, muttered in his
throat, he went into the farthest and darkest corner of the cafe and
squatted down on the floor. The old Arab carried to him in a moment a
gozeh, a pipe resembling a nargeeleh, but without the snake-like handle.
Baroudi took it for a moment, inhaled the smoke of the hashish, and
poured it out from his mouth and nostrils.

"He looks like a poor Egyptian," said Isaacson, almost in a whisper.

"He is a millionaire. By the way, didn't you see him this afternoon?"

"Where?"

"At Shepheard's. He drove up just before I saw you in a phaeton."

"The man with the Russian horses! Surely, it's impossible!"

"This afternoon he was the cosmopolitan millionaire. To-night he sinks
down into his native East."

"Who is he?"

"Mahmoud Baroudi."

"Mahmoud Baroudi!" repeated Isaacson, slowly and softly.

An old man who had crept in began to sing in a high and quavering voice
a song of the smokers of hashish, accompanying himself upon an
instrument of tortoise and goat-skin. A youth in skirts began to posture
and dance an unfinished dance of the dreamer who has been led by hashish
into a world that is sweet and vague.

"I'll tell you about him later," whispered Starnworth.

That night they sat up in the hotel till the third time of the Moslem's
prayer was near at hand. Starnworth, pleased to have an auditor who was
much more than merely sympathetic, who understood his Eastern lore as if
with a mind of the East, poured forth his curious knowledge. And
Isaacson gripped it as only the Jew can grip. He listened and listened,
saying little, until Starnworth began to speak of the strange
immutability that is apparent in Islam, and of how the East must ever,
despite the most powerful outside influences, remain utterly the East.

"Or so it seems up to now," he said.

He illustrated and emphasized his contention by a number of striking
examples. He spoke of Arabs, of Egyptians he had known intimately, whom
he had seen subjected to every kind of European influence, wh