The supple, passionate Eastern woman found it in her soul to love the slender white girl who laughed aloud in glee, and showed such amazing aptitude in learning the A.B.C. of this language, especially reserved in the East for the portrayal of the history of love and all its kin.  Presents were showered upon the teacher who, with the craft of the Oriental mind, in some cases forbore to fully explain the meaning of certain gestures, so that unintentionally a veritable lightning flash of passion blazed about Jill’s head one night, when with the innocent desire of showing the Arab how well she was progressing in the art, she suddenly stood up before him and made a slight movement of her body, holding the slender white arms rigidly to her side, whilst her small, rose-tinted right foot tapped the ground impatiently.

“Allah!” had suddenly exclaimed the Arab, as he had seized her arms and pulled her towards him.  “You would mock me, make fun of me, you woman of ice!

“How dare you make me see a picture of you in—­ah! but I cannot speak of it in words, suffice that one day I will—­Allah! you—­you dare to mock me with a picture of that which you refuse me------!”

“I haven’t the faintest idea of what you are talking about,” had replied a very ruffled Jill, as with golden anklets softly clinking she withdrew to a distance.  “If that is the effect of my dancing I will never dance for you, never!”

“But, woman, do you mean to tell me that you have no idea of the translation put upon your movements?”

“Evidently not,” haughtily replied the inwardly laughing girl.

“That you do not know the movement you made just now meant that in the dimness of the night I—­oh!  I cannot tell you, but I swear before Allah that I—­I, Hahmed, who have known no woman, will teach you the translation of every movement of all that you have learned.”

Whereupon Jill, having seated herself upon the stuffed head of an enormous lion skin, murmured “soit,” and proceeded to light a cigarette.

Her second and favourite pastime was riding, and, in as few words as possible, so that my book shall not ramble to unseemly length, I will tell you how the fame of her horsemanship had come to be spoken of, even in the almost untrodden corners of Asia and Egypt.

The whim seizing her, she would bid the Arab to her presence, sometimes to her evening repast, sometimes to sweet coffee and still sweeter music, sometimes to wander on foot or on camel-back through the oasis, to the desert stretching like a great sea beyond, and still beyond.

Everything, as you will note if you have the patience to get through to the end of this book, happened to Jill in the light of the full moon.  On this night in question, clad all in black, with the moonbeams striking rays from the silver embroidered on her veil, and the anklets above her little feet, she seemed small and fragile, altogether desirable, and infinitely to be protected to the man beside her on the edge of the sand.  Still more so when she waxed ecstatic with delight on the approach of two horses, one bay ridden by a man clothed from head to foot in white burnous, and a led mare as white as the man’s raiment.