“A daughter of the country!” What ever could the old man mean by this cryptic reply? She looked about hesitatingly.
Just then from the indiscernible depths of the great house, an arm decorated with a wide gold band thrust itself out of a cloud of long, black hair, and pushed back the half-opened sliding shutter. A darkly beautiful figure appeared up there. In response to a gesture from it, the keeper strode toward the balcony. The figure spoke to him, and he turned back to Julie.
“My Mistress says that the garden is at your disposal, and for you to go where you please.”
Julie moved curiously a few steps toward the balcony. The gold bands on the arms of the princess up there glistened alluringly down at her. A flashing brunette face came out of the shadow of the dense, splendid sweep of hair. It looked down out of a startling and incongruous pair of violet eyes. As this personality was not at all the setting for them, Julie wondered how they had come about.
They played upon the girl with a flame of interest, but their possessor did not speak. Conversation, Julie reflected, was not perhaps included among the gifts of Eastern women. This woman, she felt, had more subtle modes of expression. With her deep, understanding silence, her flashing disclosures in gestures and glance, speech would no doubt be a tardy revelation. Her sense of repose disquieted Julie, reminding her in its singular quiescence of that human becalmment that had at the first so disturbed her in this land. The blue eyes further perturbed her with their interrogations—unanswerable questions: Why she had come into this atmosphere, and what she dared to think she would achieve in it. The Caliphess in the balcony managed to convey an impression of proprietorship to this sphere, and to exact some sort of explanation for Julie’s appearance in it.
“I am a stranger—” Julie began “—it is all very wonderful to me”; she paused and looked around her with a sense of inadequateness.
“I knew that you did not belong here—”
The woman above spoke at last, using England’s English, with once in a while the flicker of some strange intonation, like the out-cropping of a subconscious tone. “But where did you come from?”
“The States—San Francisco!” Julie replied.
A change flashed across the mobile twilight face.