’Die?  Die for you?  Kill all this beautiful young thing that has such joy to dance and sing?  Never!  Some day I will be out of this and laugh at the memory of such blackness.’  And so I practice my voice and my steps—­and I wait my chance.  When you came, yesterday, first I was furious to be pushed out, then I think it is the chance, maybe.  I think you would be glad to help me to get out and not to stay to make you jealous.  But if you are also in the trap——­” Her voice fell dispiritedly.  She drew a long, weary breath.

“But I shall not stay in the trap.”  Arlee spoke with desperate resolve, her eyes on the sputtering candle, her palms against her burning cheeks, her finger tips pressed into her throbbing temples.  “I shall not let him make me afraid like this.  He must know he will be found out—­he cannot play like this with an American girl!  I shall face him to-morrow.  I shall demand my freedom.  I shall tell him that I did tell people at the hotel—­that he will be discovered.  I will make him afraid!”

“You cannot.  He watches what happens on the outside—­he knows.”

After a pause, “Oh, why did I come!” said Arlee in choking bitterness.

The little dancer turned, and, sitting there cross-legged on the couch like a squat little idol, her chin sunk in her palm, her dark eyes staring unwinkingly at Arlee, gave the girl a long, strange scrutiny.

“You do not like him?” she said.

“I hate him!”

“But you came to tea?”

“To meet his sister.  To see the palace.”

“His sister?  Did he show you one?”

“Yes—­a woman with red hair.  A Turkish woman.  She spoke French to me.”

“Ah—­that would be Seniha!”

“Seniha?  I don’t know.  She played the piano.  Has he more than one sister?”

But as she put the question a sudden flash of intuition forestalled the dancer’s mocking cry of “Sister!” And as Fritzi hurried on, “He has no sister—­not here, anyway,” Arlee’s thoughts ran back to the beginning of that very evening which seemed so long ago when she had plunged wildly into those unknown rooms, and saw again that painted, jeweled woman with her outstretched arms.

“She is his wife,” the Viennese was saying.

“I—­I did not know that he was married.”

“Oh, Turkish marriages.”  The other shrugged, with a contempt a trifle droll in one who had dispensed with every ceremony.  “She was his second.  The first was a little girl, he said.  The match was made for him.  She is dead.  This Seniha was her cousin, a cousin who was divorced and she lived with the wife.  And our pretty Hamdi made love to her, and she was mad about him and so, presently, it happens that he must marry her, for it would be terrible to have disgrace upon the wife’s family.  Besides the first wife had no children.  So he married her.  But she had no children.  It was all one fairy story.”  Fritzi laughed under her