Sally aroused herself from her apparently absorbing gazing into the “magic crystal” and looked with wide, startled eyes at the man who had addressed her in an accent which at once marked him as an easterner of culture. She had seen pictures of men dressed like that, but had never quite believed in their authenticity.
But her eyes did not linger long on his slim, elegant, immaculate figure, leaning lightly on a cane. His laughing, wise, cynical eyes challenged her and invited her to share his amusement with him. But in their bold black depths was something else....
————
“Quite delicious, really!” the man with the cultured, eastern accent drawled, leaning more nonchalantly on his cane and twinkling his too wise, too bold black eyes at “Princess Lalla.”
“But really now, I wouldn’t say you’re a freak, your highness. In fact, you’re quite the most delicious little morsel I’ve seen since I left New York. If I were a Ziegfeld scout I assure you I’d be burbling your praises in a ruinously verbose telegram, and the devil take the expense. Would you mind lifting that scrap of black lace that is tantalizing me most provokingly? I am tormented with the hope that your big eyes are really the purple pansies they appear to be through your veil.
“No?” He shook his head with humorous resignation as Sally shook her head in violent negation. “Well, well! One can’t have everything, and really your arms and your adorable little hands and your Tanagra figurine body should be quite enough—as an appetizer. You don’t happen to ‘spell’ the Hula dancer—the ancient but still hopeful lady who has just been exercising her hips for my benefit—do you? But I suppose that is too much to ask of Providence. Life is full of these bitter disappointments, these nagging, unsatisfied desires—”
“Please!” Sally gasped, forgetting her carefully acquired accent which had been bequeathed her, by way of Mrs. Bybee, by the erstwhile “Princess Lalla,” now in the hospital, minus her appendix, but still too weak to jeopardize Sally’s job. “I—I’m not permitted to talk to the audience—”
“Child, child!” the New Yorker protested, raising a beautifully kept hand admonishingly. “Spare me! I’m always being met with signs like that in New York—in elevators, busses, what-nots—But since I am intrigued with the music of your voice—a very young and un-Turkish voice, if I may be permitted to say so—I shall be delighted to cross your little brown palm with silver, provided you will guarantee that your make-up does not rub off. I’m deplorably finicky.”
Sally, overwhelmed by his gift for monologue, uttered in a teasing, bantering, intimate voice of beautiful cadences, looked desperately about her for help. But she was temporarily deserted by both audience and barker. Gus was at the moment ballyhooing Jan, the Holland giant, the chief attraction of the Palace of Wonders. His recital of the vast quantities of food which the nine-foot-nine giant consumed daily never failed to hold the crowd enthralled.
“You’ll have to wait till Gus, the barker, starts my performance,” she told him nervously, making no effort to deceive the blase New Yorker by a tardy resumption of her “Turkish” accent. “But—oh, please go away! Don’t tease me! You’ll spoil the show if you make Smart-Aleck remarks on everything I say and do.”