"One o'clock!" they shouted. "One o'clock. Masks off; masks off!"
The two walked slowly towards them.
"You would like a lion's skin, wouldn't you?" he asked eagerly, and stared amazed at the reproachful, hurt eyes which looked back at him just as the dancers swooped upon her.
A lion's skin! When she was craving for the strength of his arms about her, and the tower of his love behind her, from the top of which she could safely make monkey-faces of derision at Life, standing with lesson-books in one hand and a cane in the other.
She turned her back on him and entered the ballroom, and he went back to the seat in the garden, unconscious of the woman who watched.
And as the merry little crowd ran laughing into the hotel, the duchess, with mind intent on a cigarette, slipped out of another door and hurried as fast as her outrageous heels would allow her to a seat under the date-palms.
She took a Three Castles from the jewelled Louis XV snuff-box, rasped a match on the sole of one little crimson shoe, lit her cigarette, and studied the slipper.
Then she turned her head and saw a man, an Arab, standing beside the seat.
There had been no sound; just out of the dark he had suddenly materialised in the startling, silent way of the East.
Well does it behove us to remember that we have claimed the privilege of giving lessons in morality, culture, good-breeding, manners, in fact, in one word, civilisation to the world at large.