helmets and chain mail that their ancestors had copied from the Crusaders. It crossed the Sahara, skirting the strongholds of the Senussia Brotherhood, penetrating the wastes patrolled by the Tuaregs, ferocious camel riders whose mouths were always muffled in black bandages. It went north to the steppes of the Ziban, from which the tribe of the Ouled Nail scattered their feather-crowned dancing girls from Ceuta to Suez. And in the Atlas it entered the hill castles of Kabyles, whose unveiled, fierce-eyed, red-haired women, drenched with half a dozen perfumes, and clattering with silver, coral, turquoise and gold, were swifter than snakes with their knives.

At last it was yellow and crinkled, that picture of the fair unknown, which had become for him, in consequence of so many vivid reveries, like a living companion.

There were days when he forgot her. Then suddenly, under those desert constellations, he remembered her with a thrill. Or else, before the tent of some nomad sheikh, all at once she fluttered from the notebook to the silken carpet, on which girls with little brown feet had just been making their cuirasses of gold coins leap to the music of flageolets and drums.

And sometimes, though he had never before been superstitious, he felt that this picture was a sort of amulet. For twice when he was in danger, and there seemed to be small hope of his survival, there had come to him the fortifying thought, "Not yet, because I haven't found her in reality."

"Just a picture!" Lilla uttered, thinking of another picture that had been hardly less potent.

Yes, but when he returned home, after a dozen efforts and discouragements one day, merely by chance, he saw her alive, breathing. She whirled past in a limousine. She disappeared into the haze of a city street in summer. Whereupon he thought, "I was not mistaken; it's inevitable." He accepted the fatalism of his Arab friends, who believe that every man's destiny is fixed.

"He found her again?"

"Finally. There were difficulties."

"And they were happy ever after?"

He did not reply.

She looked over this magical garden toward the future, which now appeared like one of those deserts, but bereft of all enchantment, and covered with clouds that were not positive enough to rain. Then, gazing at the marble warrior that had seized the marble nymph, she said:

"I suppose it was you?"

"Yes," he assented, and pressed her hand to his lips.