“Oh, the pity—­after that splendid dash!” Arlee stopped and looked around her, at the strange shadowy room hung with its old embroideries and latticed with its ancient screening.  “This room makes it all so real, somehow,” she murmured.  “I didn’t believe it all when the dragoman told me—­probably because he showed me the mark of the horse’s hoof in the stone of the parapet!  I thought it was all a legend—­like the mark.”

“Did he show you, too, the bulrush where Moses was found and the indentures in the stones in the crypt of the Coptic Church where Saint Joseph and Mary sat to rest after the flight into Egypt?” laughed the Captain.  And, with a teasing smile, “Ah, what imbeciles they think you tourists!”

But Arlee merely laughed with him, while the old woman changed the plates for dessert.  Her spirits had brightened mercurially.  This was really interesting....  Uneasiness had vanished.

“Is that an old Mameluke throne?” she asked, pointing to the raised chair upon the dais, with its heavy, dusty draperies.

The Captain glanced at it and shook his head, smiling faintly.  “No, that is the throne of marriage.”  He pushed away his sweet and lighted a cigarette.  “That is where sits the bride when she has been brought to the home of her husband—­there she holds her reception.  Those are the fetes to which the English ladies come in such curiosity.”  His smile was not quite pleasant.

“You cannot blame them for feeling a real—­interest,” said Arlee hesitantly.

“Their interest—­pah!” he flung back excitably and made a violent gesture with his cigarette.  “They peer at the bride with their haggard eyes, and they say, ’What!  You have not seen your husband till to-day!  How strange—­how strange!  Has he not written to you?  Suppose you do not like him,’ and they laugh and add, ’Fancy a girl among us being married like that!’...  The imbeciles—­whose own marriages are abominations!”

For a moment Arlee was silent, instinct and impulse warring within her.  The man was a maniac upon those subjects, and it was madness to exchange a word with him—­but her young anger darted through her discretion.

“They are not abominations!” she gave back proudly.

“But I know—­I know—­have I not been at marriages in England?” he declared, with startling fierceness.  “Men and women crowd about the bride; they press in line and kiss her; bearded mouths and shaven lips, young and old, they brush off that exquisite bloom of innocence which a husband delights to discover.  Her lips are soiled, fanee....  And then the man and woman go away together into a public hotel or a train, and the people laugh and shout after them, and hurl shoes and rice, with a great din of noise.  I have heard!” He stopped, looked a moment at the flushed curve of Arlee’s averted face, the droop of her shadowy lashes which veiled the confusion and anger of her spirit, and then, leaning forward, his eyes still upon her, he spoke in a lower, softer tone, caressing in its inflections.