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Rh of tempestuous pain to him; to find in her a leader of the artificial worlds of fashion; a coquette, worn, brilliant and chill as her own diamonds, with every smile a beautiful lie, with every glance a demand for accustomed homage, would be scarce better than to find in her one of the cancan worshippers of the Opera throng, a débardeur in rose and silver, laughing through her velvet mask of Venice! Of all places, of all hours, were there none in the width of the world, in the vastness of time, to have found her in at the last than at midnight in the Rue Lépelletier! Who was she? What was she?—this phantom which pursued him? He wondered restlessly, as he did often in lonely moments like these, while he sat looking down the Bosphorus as the lights gleamed in the distance among the oypress and orange groves of the city of the Moslem, and the far-off cry of the Imaum wailed deep and mournful through the silence, chanting the evening prayer of the Faithful.

As he sat thus he did not notice or hear a man approach him on horseback, riding slowly along the sea-shore, unarmed, and lightly chanting a little French air—a handsome, careless, graceful Greek, whose saddle reveries seemed of the lightest and brightest as he swayed a bunch of Turkish lilies