“Ahmeda!”

Batouch shouted.  His voice came like a stone from a catapult.  The merchant turned calmly and without haste, showing an aquiline face covered with wrinkles, tufted with white hairs, lit by eyes that shone with the cruel expressiveness of a falcon’s.  After a short colloquy in Arabic he raised himself from his haunches, and came to the front of the room, where there was a small wooden counter.  He was smiling now with a grace that was almost feminine.

“What perfume does Madame desire?” he said in French.

Domini gazed at him as at a deep mystery, but with the searching directness characteristic of her, a fearlessness so absolute that it embarrassed many people.

“Please give me something that is of the East—­not violets, not lilac.”

“Amber,” said Batouch.

The merchant, still smiling, reached up to a shelf, showing an arm like a brown twig, and took down a glass bottle covered with red and green lines.  He removed the stopper, made Domini take off her glove, touched her bare hand with the stopper, then with his forefinger gently rubbed the drop of perfume which had settled on her skin till it was slightly red.

“Now, smell it,” he commanded.

Domini obeyed.  The perfume was faintly medicinal, but it filled her brain with exotic visions.  She shut her eyes.  Yes, that was a voice of Africa too.  Oh! how far away she was from her old life and hollow days.  The magic carpet had been spread indeed, and she had been wafted into a strange land where she had all to learn.

“Please give me some of that,” she said.

The merchant poured the amber into a phial, where it lay like a thread in the glass, weighed it in a scales and demanded a price.  Batouch began at once to argue with vehemence, but Domini stopped him.

“Pay him,” she said, giving Batouch her purse.

The perfume-seller took the money with dignity, turned away, squatted upon his haunches against the blackened wall, and picked up the broad-leaved volume which lay upon the floor.  He swayed gently and rhythmically to and fro.  Then once more the voice of the drowsy bee hummed in the shadows.  The worshipper and the Prophet stood before the feet of Allah.

And the woman—­she was set afar off, as woman is by white-robed men in Africa.

“Now, Batouch, you can carry the perfume to the hotel and I will go to that garden.”

“Alone?  Madame will never find it.”

“I can ask the way.”

“Impossible!  I will escort Madame to the gate.  There I will wait for her.  Monsieur the Count does not permit the Arabs to enter with strangers.”

“Very well,” Domini said.

The seller of perfumes had led her towards a dream.  She was not combative, and she would be alone in the garden.  As they walked towards it in the sun, through narrow ways where idle Arabs lounged with happy aimlessness, Batouch talked of Count Anteoni, the owner of the garden.