, their mistress, in whom they felt such inordinate
pride; so that one, then two, then more, from distances long and short,
would creep into the council with pretexts ranging from the thin to the
absolutely transparent, until one morning the whole seance ended in an
unseemly fracas between the legitimate and the illegitimate seekers
after help in word or kind, whereupon Hahmed, rising in his wrath,
smote them verbally hip and thigh, and Jill departed in high dudgeon,
leaving the culprits to wilt in the frost of her keen displeasure.

And from about that date, a month ago, everything seemed to have gone
wrong.

Days of depression would follow days of mad spirits, hours when she was
as the sweetest scented rose within the hands of the Arab, followed by
interminable, stretches of time when the points of the "wait-a-bit"
thorn were blunt compared to the exceeding sharpness of her temper.

Days when all that was right was wrong, and all that was wrong _was_
wrong, so that her women crept quietly, and Hahmed wondered sometimes
if some "afreet"[1] haunted the soil and had taken possession of the
soul of his beloved.

Jill swung to and fro in a hammock slung between two palms at a very
early hour indeed of this morning late in December.

She had neither veil before her face nor shoes upon her feet, and the
flimsy mauve robe clung to the supple body as she restlessly swung,
until she clapped her hands to summon her breakfast, and clapped them
again sharply so that a figure came running at high pressure.

"Go, ask thy master if he will break bread with me in the shade of the
palms, oh Laleah, and let not the shadows lengthen unduly in thy going
for fear that I give thee cause to hasten thy footsteps!"

Which manner of speech shows that Jill had not unduly tarried either in
acquiring knowledge of things Eastern. And Hahmed, as he stood before
her and greeted her in the beautiful Arabian tongue, wondered if in all
the world there could be found such another picture as that of his
wife, with the riot of red-gold hair about her little face, which
somehow seemed over white in the shade of the palm, and the blueness of
her eyes, and the redness of her mouth, which neither the one nor the
other smiled at his approach.

"Do sit down and help yourself!" said she indeed, and clapping her
hands sharply ordered fresh food and drinks, both hot and cold, to be
brought upon the instant.

And her next remark, after the breakfast of te