Stepping across the threshold, with a sudden excited quickening of the senses, in which so many things were mingled that the misgiving there had scarcely time to make itself felt, Arlee found herself in a spacious vestibule, marble floored and inlaid with brilliant tile.  She had just a glimpse of an inner court between the high arches opposite, and then her attention was claimed by Captain Kerissen, who sprang forward with a flash of welcome in his eyes that was like a leap of palpable light.

“You are come!” he said, in a voice which was that of a man almost incredulous of his good fortune.  Then he bowed very formally in his best military fashion, straight-backed from the waist, heels stiffly together.  “I welcome you,” he said.  “My sister is rejoiced....  This stair—­if you please.”

He waved to a stairway on the left, a small, steep affair, which Arlee ascended slowly, a sense of strangeness mounting with her, in spite of her confident bearing.  She had not realized how odd it would feel to be in this foreign house with the Captain at her heels.

There was a door at the top of the stairs standing open into a long, spacious room which seemed shrouded in twilight after the sunflooded court.  One entire side of the room was a brown, lace-like screen of mashrubiyeh windows; wide divans stretched beside them, and at the end of the room, facing Arlee, was a throne-like chair raised on a small dais and canopied with heavy silks.

By one of the windows a woman was squatting, a short, stout, turbaned figure, striking a few notes on a tambourine and crooning softly to herself in a low guttural.  She raised her head without rising, to look at the entering couple, and for a startled second Arlee had the half hysterical fear that this squatting soloist was the triste and aristocratic representative of the haut-monde of Moslem which the Captain had brought her to see, but the next instant another figure appeared in a doorway and came slowly toward them.

Flying to the winds went Arlee’s anticipations of somber elegance.  She saw the most amazingly vivid creature that she had ever laid eyes on—­a woman, young, though not in her first youth, penciled, powdered, painted, her hair a brilliant red, her gown a brilliant green.  After the first shock of scattering amazement, Arlee became intensely aware of a pair of yellow-brown eyes confronting her with a faintly smiling and rather mocking interrogation.  The dark of kohl about the eyes emphasized a certain slant diablerie of line and a faint penciling connected with the high and supercilious arch of the brows.  Henna flamed on the pointed tips of the fingers blazoned with glittering rings, and Arlee fancied the brilliance of the hair was due to this same generous assistance of nature.

“My soul!” thought the girl swiftly, “they do get themselves up!”

The Captain had stepped forward, speaking quickly in Turkish, with a hard-sounding rattle of words.  The sister glanced at him with a deepening of that curious air of mockery and let fall two words in the same tongue.  Then she turned to Arlee.