“’There was a gipsy maiden within the forest green,
     There was a gipsy maiden who shook a tambourine. 
     The stars of night had not the face,
     The woodland wind had not the grace,
       Of Flamencine.’”

Then the music stopped, and with its silencing came the monk, the clown, the grandee, and others.

In the insistent demand of the many the Arab had too few dances with the Spanish girl.  There were Comanches, Samurai, policemen, Zulus and courtiers, who, seeing her dance, discovered that their immediate avocation was dancing with her.

Yet it wanted an hour of unmasking time when a Bedouin led a gipsy maiden from Andalusia into the deserted library, where the darkness was broken only by blazing logs on an open hearth.

When they were alone he turned to her anxiously.  His voice was freighted with appeal.  Her face, now unmasked, wore an expression of stunned misery.

“Dear,” he asked, “how are you?”

She gazed at the flickering logs.  “I should think you would know,” she answered wearily.  Then, with a mirthless laugh, she spread both hands toward the blaze.  “I’m looking ahead—­I can see it all there in the fire.”  Her fingers convulsively clenched themselves until blue marks showed against the pink palms.

He pushed a chair forward for her, but with a shake of her head she declined it.

“Whoever heard of a gipsy girl sitting in a leather chair?” she demanded.  “It’s more like—­like some effete princess.”

She dropped to the Persian rug and, gathering her knees between her clasped hands, sat looking into the dying blaze.  “For a few brief minutes I am the gipsy girl,” she added.

“And,” he said, dropping cross-legged to the rug at her side, “when the caravan halts at evening, and prayers have been said facing Mecca, and the grunting camels kneel, to be unloaded, neither do we, the gipsies of the desert, sit in chairs.”  He swayed slightly toward her, lowering his voice to a whisper.  As the soft touch of her shoulder brushed him and electrified him, his cashmere-draped arms closed around her and held her hungrily to him.  The vagrant maiden of Andalusia and the caravan-driver of Africa sat gazing together at the glowing pictures in the logs as they turned slowly to ashes.

“Cara,” he went on in a voice of pent-up earnestness, “we be nomads—­we two.  ’The scarlet of the maples can shake us like the cry of bugles going by.’  Come away with me while there is time.  Let us follow out our destinies where gipsy blood calls us; in the desert, the jungle, wherever you say.  Let your fancy be our guide—­your heart our compass.  Suppose”—­he paused and, with one outstretched arm, pointed to the fire—­“suppose that to be a camp-fire—­what do you see in the coals?”

“I have already told you,” she said wearily.  “I see a throne, a life with all the confining littleness of a prison, with none of the breadth of an empire.  I see the sacrifice of all I love.  I see year upon year of purple desolation....  Purple is the color of mourning and royalty.”