Desert Love

ss the hour; he will look at and criticise her with much less enthusiasm than he would a she-camel,

ccidental women when three orientals of their own sex, without a vestige o

sire to bury her face in a cushion and to give way to unrestrained hysterical laughter. This same feeling has been known to overcome one in Church when a hen, side-tracking through the open door, takes a constitutional up the aisle on a Sunday morning in the country; also it has been known to seize you in its grip at a levee, when your predecessor's shoe-buckles, not having been properly adjusted, flip up and down like shutter

. Up and down, and round and round they went, the string band twanging an accompaniment, until the gauze scarf of the middle lady catching in the hanging chandelier put an e

d of raising native wrath by allowing even a glimmer of a smile to appear, buried her pretty head on the marchese's over-padded shoulder, which action he of course took for a sign of encouragement,

to make any comment, the women not daring to look at each other, until the widow, suddenly seizing upon the situation, clapped her little

stereotyped utterances such as "how very Eastern," "so unexpected," the entire party rose to their feet, the dragoman holding a hurried whispered conversation with the men who each, and succe

ur de monde, having overheard them complaining bitterly of their own French maid who had not been retrieved at Algiers. But her whole soul suddenly rising in mutiny against the stultifying civilisation of the West, she finally made up her mind to stay with the strangers until the hour came when she could slip out of the hotel where they were staying the night, into oriental liberty, and glamour, and unknown possibilities.