She wore a tunic of black chiffon shot with gold, very light, very full, slightly gathered in by a white muslin scarf embroidered with iris in black pearls.

That was Antinea’s costume.  But what was she beneath all this?  A slim young girl, with long green eyes and the slender profile of a hawk.  A more intense Adonis.  A child queen of Sheba, but with a look, a smile, such as no Oriental ever had.  A miracle of irony and freedom.

I did not see her body.  Indeed I should not have thought of looking at it, had I had the strength.  And that, perhaps, was the most extraordinary thing about that first impression.  In that unforgettable moment nothing would have seemed to me more horribly sacrilegious than to think of the fifty victims in the red marble hall, of the fifty young men who had held that slender body in their arms.

She was still laughing at me.

“King Hiram,” she called.

I turned and saw my enemy.

On the capital of one of the columns, twenty feet above the floor, a splendid leopard was crouched.  He still looked surly from the blow I had dealt him.

“King Hiram,” Antinea repeated.  “Come here.”

The beast relaxed like a spring released.  He fawned at his mistress’s feet.  I saw his red tongue licking her bare little ankles.

“Ask the gentleman’s pardon,” she said.

The leopard looked at me spitefully.  The yellow skin of his muzzle puckered about his black moustache.

“Fftt,” he grumbled like a great cat.

“Go,” Antinea ordered imperiously.

The beast crawled reluctantly toward me.  He laid his head humbly between his paws and waited.

I stroked his beautiful spotted forehead.

“You must not be vexed,” said Antinea.  “He is always that way with strangers.”

“Then he must often be in bad humor,” I said simply.

Those were my first words.  They brought a smile to Antinea’s lips.

She gave me a long, quiet look.

“Aguida,” she said to one of the Targa women, “you will give twenty-five pounds in gold to Cegheir-ben-Cheikh.”

“You are a lieutenant?” she asked, after a pause.

“Yes.”

“Where do you come from?”

“From France.”

“I might have guessed that,” she said ironically, “but from what part of France?”

“From what we call the Lot-et-Garonne.”

“From what town?”

“From Duras.”

She reflected a moment.

“Duras!  There is a little river there, the Dropt, and a fine old chateau.”

“You know Duras?” I murmured, amazed.

“You go there from Bordeaux by a little branch railway,” she went on.  “It is a shut-in road, with vine-covered hills crowned by the feudal ruins.  The villages have beautiful names:  Monsegur, Sauve-terre-de-Guyenne, la Tresne, Creon, ...  Creon, as in Antigone.”

“You have been there?”