her own
apartment. Once she had even crept across to the carven screen in order
that she might peep through into the big, softly lighted room. She
had interrupted her toilet to do so, and having satisfied herself that
Grantham was one of the speakers (although she had really known this
already), she had returned and stared at herself critically in the
mirror.

Zahara, whose father had been a Frenchman, possessed skin of a subtle
cream colour very far removed from the warm brown of her Egyptian
mother, but yet not white. At night it appeared dazzling, for she
enhanced its smooth, creamy pallor with a wonderful liquid solution
which came from Paris. It was hard, Zahara had learned, to avoid a
certain streaky appearance, but much practice had made her an adept.

This portion of her toilet she had already completed and studying her
own reflection she wondered, as she had always wondered, what Agapoulos
could see in Safiyeh. Safiyeh was as brown as a berry; quite pretty for
an Egyptian girl, as Zahara admitted scornfully, but brown--brown. It
was a great puzzle to Zahara. The mystery of life indeed had puzzled
little Zahara very much from the moment when she had first begun to
notice things with those big, surprising blue eyes of hers, right up to
the present twenty-fourth year of her life. She had an uneasy feeling
that Safiyeh, who was only sixteen, knew more of this mystery than she
did. Once, shortly after the Egyptian girl had come to the house of
Agapoulos, Zahara had playfully placed her round white arm against that
of the more dusky beauty, and:

"Look!" she had exclaimed. "I am cream and you are coffee."

"It is true," the other had admitted in her practical, serious way, "but
some men do not like cream. All men like coffee."

Zahara rested her elbows upon the table and surveyed the reflection
of her perfect shoulders with disapproval. She had been taught at her
mother's knee that men did not understand women, and she, who had been
born and reared in that quarter of Cairo where there is no day but one
long night, had lived to learn the truth of the lesson. Yet she was not
surprised that this was so; for Zahara did not understand herself. Her
desires were so simple and so seemingly natural, yet it would appear
that they were contrary to the established order of things.

She was proud to think that she was French, although someone had told
her that the French, though brave, were mercenary. Zahara admired the
Fr