Suddenly the caravan driver commenced a hurried and zigzag course across the crowded floor. The eyes of Colonel Von Ritz indolently followed.
Through a low-silled window a girl had just entered, carrying herself with the untrammeled freedom of some wild thing, erect, poised from the waist, rhythmic in motion. Her walk was like the scansion of good verse. The Bedouin caught the grace before the ensemble of costume met his eye. It was in harmony.
She wore a silk skirt to the ankles, and about her waist and hips was bound the yellow and red sash of the Spanish gipsy, tightly knotted, and falling at its tasseled ends. Her arms were bare to the elbows, and gay with bracelets; her hair fell from her forehead and temples, dropping over her shoulders in two ribbon bound braids. A tall, gray-cowled monk, whose military bearing gave the lie to his cassock, a Spanish grandee, and a fool in motley saw her at the same moment and hurried to intercept her, but with a slide which carried him a quarter of the way across the floor the Bedouin arrived first, and before the others had come up he was drifting away with her in the tide of the dancers.
"Allah is good to me—Flamencine," whispered the camel-driver as he drew her close to avoid a careless dancer.
"Why, Flamencine?" demanded a carefully altered voice, from which, however, the music had not been eliminated.
"Don't you remember?" The Arab stole a covert, identifying glance down at the tip of one ear which showed under its masking of brown hair—an ear that looked as though it were chiseled from the pink coral of Capri. He quoted:
"'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,