The scent in the air was disagreeable.  Tawdry spangles and false jewels lay about on the tumble-down settees.  From behind little doors that opened from the walls round came the sound of men’s voices.

“Let the Sahib come this way, then,” she answered, and turned towards one of the small doors in the wall.  This took them into another tiny, musty-smelling passage that wound about like the run of a rabbit warren, only wide enough for one to pass along at a time, and the strips of lath were so low overhead that Hamilton bent his neck involuntarily to avoid them.

At a door in the side of this she stopped and pushed it open; the little run way wound on beyond in the darkness.

Hamilton followed her into the sloping-roofed, lath-and-plaster pent-house that had been run up between the back of the stage and the wall of the building.  Native lamps were hooked into the wall, and their light showed the garish ugliness of it all—­the hastily whitewashed walls, the scraps of ragged, dirty, scarlet cloth hung here and there over a bulge or stain in the plaster:  the boarded floor, uneven and cracked:  the bed against the wall, not too clean looking, its dingy curtains not quite concealing the dingier pillows; the broken chair on which a basin stood, placed on two grey-looking towels; another chair with the back rails knocked out leaning against the wall.

He threw his gaze round it in a moment’s rapid survey, then he pressed to the rickety, uneven door and shot the bolt.

The girl stood in the middle of the room, an exquisitely lovely figure.  She regarded him with wide, innocent eyes.  Hamilton felt all the blood alight in his veins; it seemed to him he could hear his pulses beating.  Never in his life before had joy and passion met within him to stir him as they did now, but in natures where there is a strong, deep strain of intellectuality the body never quite conquers the mind, the light of the intellect never quite goes down, however strong the sea, however high the waves of animal passion on which it rides; and now Hamilton felt the great appeal to his brain as well as to his senses that the girl’s beauty made.

He went up to her.  She looked at him with an intense admiration, almost worship in her eyes.  A man at such moments looks, as Nature intended he should, his very best, and Hamilton’s face, of a noble and splendid type, lighted now by the keenest animation, held her gaze.

“Tell me,” he said in a low tone, for footsteps passed on the creaking boards, and gibbering voices and laughter could be heard outside, “tell me, what is that man to you?  Do you belong to him, all of you?”

“That...?  He is not a man, he is a ... nothing,” replied the girl, looking up with calm, glorious eyes.  “He can do no harm ... nor good.”

Hamilton drew a quick breath.

“You dance like this every evening, and then choose someone in the audience in this way?” he questioned, slipping his hand round her neck and looking down at her, a half-amused sadness coming into his eyes.