"Really," Fanny Brassfield exclaimed, in her high-pitched, insolent voice, "I must get myself one of these—what is he again? Zanzibari?"
Hamoud, towering there in the attire of an Omân gentleman—which she took for a specially effective livery—contemplated the great Mrs. Brassfield. His full eyelids were dreamily lowered over his lustrous eyes. His long, straight nose seemed narrower than usual, perhaps from disdain. But his clear-cut carnelian mouth, vivid between his faint mustache and his delicate beard, did not change expression, although he was calling the great Mrs. Brassfield a female beneath the contempt of a Muscat slaver, the progeny of camels and alley dogs, and other names besides. As if regretfully he turned away to David Verne, measured out the solution of arsenic, and presented the goblet, a tapering treasure covered with gilt and crimson protuberances, an antique that had stood before men in the wave-lapped palaces of Venice, brimming with Greek wine, or maybe with Renaissance poison.
David Verne himself raised the goblet.
"Dr. Fallows has really done wonders, hasn't he?"
"Wonders," Lilla echoed with a smile.
In the hall, as she was leaving, Fanny Brassfield said to Lilla:
"By the way, Anna Zanidov is in town. She was asking after you."
Without moving, Lilla murmured slowly:
"Ah, she wants to tell my fortune again, perhaps?"
"She stopped doing that. It got too uncanny. You know yourself that everything she ever predicted came to pass. Including three deaths; that is, two besides——"