“What is that?” asked the commandant.  “Do you wish to be Minister of Justice?”

“No,” said the lawyer; “but I should like to be known as the best player of Napoleon solitaire.”

A sabre-hilt rapped on the door.

“Enter,” cried the commandant.

The door opened, and there entered first the sharp cries of the mob, and then the corporal, Abdullah, a woman clothed all in white, the oukil, and, last of all, Mirza.  The moment she was within the room she dominated it.  The other occupants were blotted out by comparison.  She entered, debonair, smiling, and, as she crossed the threshold, she flung up her hand in a military salute.

“Hail, my masters,” she cried in Arabic.  “Would you believe it? but just now I was nearly robbed, before your windows, of merchandise that cost me thirty ounces.”

“Be good enough to speak French,” said the commandant; “it is the etiquette of the office.”

“And to you?” exclaimed Mirza, in the speech of Paris, “to you, who speak such charming Arabic.  It was only last week, the evening you did me the honor of supping with me, that Miriam—­perhaps you will pay her the compliment of remembering her—­the little girl who played and danced for you, and who, when you were going, hooked on your sword for you, and gave you a light from her cigarette?—­well, Miriam said, when you were gone, ’It is a pity the gracious commandant speaks any language save Arabic, he speaks that so convincingly.’  What could you have whispered to her, Monsieur le Commandant, as you left my poor house?”

The commandant moved nervously in his chair and glanced out of the corner of his eye at the lawyer, who had resumed his cards.  Reassured by the apparent abstraction of his friend, the commandant gathered himself and essayed a pleasantry.

“I told her,” he said, “that if she lived to be twice her age, she might be half as beautiful as you.”

Mirza made an exaggerated courtesy and threw a mocking kiss from her finger-tips.  “I thought,” she said, “that a woman’s age was something that no well-bred Frenchman would speak of.”  Then she drew herself up and her face, from mocking, became hard and cruel.

“I know,” she said, slowly, “that I am old.  I am eight-and-twenty.  I was a wife at twelve, and a mother at thirteen.  Such matters are ordered differently here, Monsieur.  A girl is a woman before she has had any childhood.  I married Ilderhim.  Of course, I had never seen him until we stood before the cadi.  I had the misfortune to bear him a daughter, and he cursed me.  When I was fourteen, a Russian Grand Duke came to Biskra and my husband sold me to him.  I refused to submit myself.  Then Ilderhim beat me and turned me out of his house.  You understand, Monsieur le Commandant, that under our blessed religion a man may have as many wives as he chooses and may divorce them when he chooses.  Well, there I was, without a husband, without a home, without my child, and I