On the divan, dressed in native costume, with the turban and djelab, Baroudi was sitting on his haunches with his legs tucked under him, smoking hashish and gazing at the gilded ball as it rose and fell on the water.  A little way off, supported by many cushions, an Eastern girl was lying.  She looked very young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen.  But her face was painted, her eyes were bordered with kohl, and the nails of her fingers and of her bare toes were tinted with the henna.  She wore the shintiyan, and a tob, or kind of shirt of coloured and spangled gauze.  On her pale brown arms there were quantities of narrow bracelets.  She, too, was smoking a little pipe with a mouthpiece of coral.

Mrs. Armine stood still in the doorway.  She looked at the girl, and now, immediately, she thought of her own appearance, with something like terror.

“Baroudi!” she said.  “Baroudi!”

He stared at her face.

When she saw that, with trembling fingers she unfastened her cloak and let it fall on the floor.

“Baroudi!” she repeated.

But Baroudi still stared at her face.

With one hand he held the long stem of his pipe, but he had stopped smoking.

At once she felt despair.

But she came on into the middle of the saloon.

“Send her away!” she said.  “Send her away!”

She spoke in French.  And he answered in French: 

“Why?”

“I’ve left my husband.  I’ve left the villa.  I can never go back.”

“Why not?” he said, still gazing at her face.

He threw back his head, and his great throat showed among the folds of muslin that swept down to his mighty chest.

“He knows!”

“Knows!  Who has told him?”

“I have!”

As he looked at her, she grew quite cold, as if she had been plunged into icy water.

“You have told him about me?” he said.

“Not all about you!  But he knows that—­that I made him ill, that I wished him to die.  I told him, because I wanted to get away.  I had to get away—­and be with you....”

The bracelets on the arms of the Eastern girl jingled as she moved behind Mrs. Armine.

“Send her away!  Send her away!” Mrs. Armine repeated.

“Hamza!”

Baroudi called, but not loudly.  Hamza came in at the door.

Baroudi spoke to him quickly in Arabic.  A torrent of words that sounded angry, as Arabic words do to those from the Western world, rushed out of his throat.  What did they mean?  Mrs. Armine did not know.  But she did know that her fate was in them.

Hamza said nothing, only made her a sign to follow him.

But she stood still.

“Baroudi!” she said.

“Go with Hamza,” he said, in French.

And she went, without another word, past the girl, and out of the room.

Hamza, with a sign, told her to go in front of him.  She went slowly down the passage, into the first saloon.  There she hesitated, looked back.  Hamza signed to her to go on.  She passed under the Loulia’s motto—­for the last time.  On the sailors’ deck she paused.