Without a pause he crept on across the room and looked through the door at its opposite end, which gave on the arcaded square of the serai.
All was still. Here and there among the ruined arches a twinkling light told of some wayfarer late come, and from the shadows a mixed bubbling of hookahs and camels could be heard drowsily.
She was not there, however, as he had found her sometimes, listening to a bard or wandering juggler; for she was not as the others, tame as cows, but rather as the birds, wild and flighty. So he passed on, out through the massive doorway, built by dead kings, and stood once more on the white gleam of the road, listening. From far down it, nearer the town, came the unmelodious hee-haw of a concertina played regardless of its keys.
"Hee, hee, haw! Haw, hee, hee!"
His old ear knew the rhythm. That was the dance in which the sahib-logue kicked and stamped and laughed. This was Julia Castello's doing. There was a "nautch" among the black people with the sahib's hats, and the Miss-Sahiba--his Miss-Sahiba--had been lured to it!
Once more, without a pause, the instinct as to the right thing to do coming to him with certainty, he turned aside to his cook-room, and, lighting a hurricane lantern, began to rummage in a battered tin box, which, bespattered still with such labels as "Wanted on the Voyage," proclaimed itself a perquisite from some past services.
So, ten minutes afterwards, a starched simulacrum of what had once been a Chief Commissioner's butler (even to a tarnished silver badge in the orthodox headgear shaped like a big pith quoit) appeared in the verandah of Mrs. Castello's house, and, pointing with dignity to the glimmer of a hurricane lantern in the dusty darkness by the gate, said, as he produced a moth-eaten cashmere opera-cloak trimmed with moulting swansdown:
"As per previous order, the Miss-Sahiba's ayah hath appeared for her mistress, with this slave as escort."
Elflida Norma, a dancing incarnation of pure mischief, looked round angrily on the burst of noisy laughter which followed, and the pausing stamp of her foot was not warranted by the polka.
"Why you laugh?" she cried, passionately. "He is my servant--he belongs to our place."