“That is a sign that I am coming back, and believe me, the worst of Arabs would pass this way and seeing the sign would leave my belongings unmolested.  Yes! even if many moons passed, until the skins had rotted, and the sands had covered the rotted remains.”

After which explanation, Jill remained silent for a space, and then approached her camel, feeling that the rapping of her knuckles, however slight, had been quite unwarranted, for her sympathy in human beings and their feelings was great, and the understanding which kept her from wounding the sensibilities of those humans even greater.

Her wish to draw out the man had caused her figurative feet to make a faux pas, in fact she felt that her pedestal had tilted ever so slightly, causing the drapery of decency, and courtesy, to swing aside for one moment, exposing a particle of clay upon the ivory of her beautiful feet to the eyes of the man whose outlook on life was so broad, whose principles were so stern, and whose people she had so rudely criticised.  Therefore she was dissatisfied with herself.  Though, if she had known it, the man looked upon her with the same solicitude and tenderness, as you or I would look upon the babe, who, in its first efforts to get from table to chair, pulls the table-cloth about its unsteady little feet.

Also sensing that the woman he loved was troubled, there was no gladness in the heart of the Arab, so that, in his anxiety to remove the pebble from the path, he approached her, as she stood with skirt lifted in readiness to mount her recumbent camel, whereupon she looked up at the grave face and apologised truly and sweetly, and by her sweet and humble act, causing the man of the East to marvel at her strength, and to salaam deeply before her as he accounted himself as the sand beneath her little feet.

“Now wait a moment!” laughed Jill, whose worries disappeared beneath the warmth of her happy nature with the vanishing celerity of the dew beneath the sun.  “I am going to try my hand with the camels.  I really have a good deal of influence over animals—­domesticated ones, I mean------ Oh!  Yes!  I suppose they are, but of course in England we don’t have them hanging around as we do horses and dogs, you know.  I don’t like cats, however—­I simply can’t stand the way they look past and through you, at the spirits I always think, which we humans cannot see standing beside us.

“I had one once, I found her in the picture gallery one night, who positively made me creep.  She would get up suddenly from the fire and go sidling and wriggling across the room in the most absurd fashion, purring and simply confused with delight, to rub herself up and down the empty air, and by the way her tail was flattened down and then shot up again, I was positive she was being stroked.  She almost lived in the picture gallery, sitting staring at the pictures of an ancestor of mine, who had the most frightful reputation.