She would look across upon mothers with obstreperous sons who would not work, or would not wed; mothers who beat their breasts in despair at the utter lack of looks or grace in the unfortunately multiplied feminine arrows within the parental quiver; young men who craved a word of recommendation so as to obtain a certain post; older men who craved an overdraft at the bank of her patience; young mothers whose infants were either too fat or too lean, or with eyes half-eaten away with disease; all of whom having received a full measure of help, pressed down and running over, and having bestrewn themselves upon the ground around her chair, would depart in high fettle to spread the news of this wonder woman, 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.