“You will, rye, you will,” she said confidentially.  “Come, my darling gentleman, cross my hand with silver and I dance.  I swear it.  No hokkeny baro will you behold when the wind pipes for me.”

“Hokkeny baro.”

“A great swindle, my wise sir.  Hai, what a pity you cannot patter the gentle Romany tongue.  Kek!  Kek!  What does it matter, when you speak Gentile gibberish like an angel.  Sit, rye, and I dance for you.”

“Quite like Carmen and Don Jose in the opera,” murmured Lambert, sliding down to the foot of the rude stone.

“What of her and of him?  Were they Romans?”

“Carmen was and Jose wasn’t.  She danced herself into his heart.”

Chaldea’s eyes flashed, and she made a hasty sign to attract the happy omen of his saying to herself.  “Kushto bak,” cried Chaldea, using the gypsy for good luck.  “And to me, to me,” she clapped her hand.  “Hark, my golden rye, and watch me dance your love into my life.”

The wind was rising and sighed through the wood, shaking myriad leaves from the trees.  Blending with its faint cry came a long, sweet, sustained note of music.  Lambert started, so weird and unexpected was the sound.  “Kara, isn’t it?” he asked, looking inquiringly at Chaldea.

“He talks to the night—­he speaks with the wind.  Oh-ah-ah-ah.  Ah-oha-oha-oha-ho,” sang the gypsy, clapping her hands softly, then, as the music came breathing from the hidden violin in dreamy sensuous tones, she raised her bare arms and began to dance.  The place, the dancer, the hour, the mysterious music, and the pale enchantments of the moon—­it was like fairyland.

Lambert soon let his cigar go out, so absorbed did he become in watching the dance.  It was a wonderful performance, sensuous and weirdly unusual.  He had never seen a dance exactly like it before.  The violin notes sounded like actual words, and the dancer answered them with responsive movements of her limbs, so that without speech the onlooker saw a love-drama enacted before his eyes.  Chaldea—­so he interpreted the dance—­swayed gracefully from the hips, without moving her feet, in the style of a Nautch girl.  She was waiting for some one, since to right and left she swung with a delicate hand curved behind her ear.  Suddenly she started, as if she heard an approaching footstep, and in maidenly confusion glided to a distance, where she stood with her hands across her bosom, the very picture of a surprised nymph.  Mentally, the dance translated itself to Lambert somewhat after this fashion: 

“She waits for her lover.  That little run forward means that she sees him coming.  She falls at his feet; she kisses them.  He raises her—­I suppose that panther spring from the ground means that he raises her.  She caresses him with much fondling and many kisses.  By Jove, what pantomime!  Now she dances to please him.  She stops and trembles; the dance does not satisfy.  She tries another.  No!  No!  Not that!  It is too dreamy—­the lover is in a martial mood.  This time she strikes his fancy.  Kara is playing a wild Hungarian polonaise.  Wonderful!  Wonderful!”