His eyes were full of a piteous anxiety and discomfort, and he glanced almost guiltily to right and left of him as if he expected the hooded Arab spectators to condemn his presence there now that the dancer drew their attention to it.  The dancer noticed his confusion and seemed pleased by it, and moved to more energetic demonstrations of her art.  She lifted her arms above her head, half closed her eyes, assumed an expression of languid ecstasy and slowly shuddered.  Then, bending backward, she nearly touched the floor, swung round, still bending, and showed the long curve of her bare throat to the stranger, while the girls, huddled on the bench by the musicians, suddenly roused themselves and joined their voices in a shrill and prolonged twitter.  The Arabs did not smile, but the deepness of their attention seemed to increase like a cloud growing darker.  All the luminous eyes in the room were steadily fixed upon the man leaning back against the hideous picture on the wall and the gaudy siren curved almost into an arch before him.  The musicians blew their hautboys and beat their tomtoms more violently, and all things, Domini thought, were filled with a sense of climax.  She felt as if the room, all the inanimate objects, and all the animate figures in it, were instruments of an orchestra, and as if each individual instrument was contributing to a slow and great, and irresistible crescendo.  The stranger took his part with the rest, but against his will, and as if under some terrible compulsion.

His face was scarlet now, and his shining eyes looked down on the dancer’s throat and breast with a mingling of eagerness and horror.  Slowly she raised herself, turned, bent forwards quivering, and presented her face to him, while the women twittered once more in chorus.  He still stared at her without moving.  The hautboy players prolonged a wailing note, and the tomtoms gave forth a fierce and dull murmur almost like a death, roll.

“She wants him to give her money,” Batouch whispered to Domini.  “Why does not he give her money?”

Evidently the stranger did not understand what was expected of him.  The music changed again to a shrieking tune, the dancer drew back, did a few more steps, jerked her stomach with fury, stamped her feet on the floor.  Then once more she shuddered slowly, half closed her eyes, glided close to the stranger, and falling down deliberately laid her head on his knees, while again the women twittered, and the long note of the hautboys went through the room like a scream of interrogation.

Domini grew hot as she saw the look that came into the stranger’s face when the woman touched his knees.

“Go and tell him it’s money she wants!” she whispered to Batouch.  “Go and tell him!”