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 carpet. Savagely he trod them out, as though ~ the white roll were the white throat of a woman. What a wonderful white throat she had; smooth as the inside of a shell, yet palpitating with life. And that line of chin, that defiant, devilish chin! His lips burned as though con- sumed with fire; they hungered and thirsted for the touch of that cool white flesh.

Odd murmurs reached him, like the memory of long dead words; they were breathed at him from every corner of the room. Many lands swept before his vision, many eyes looked out at him from strange, mysterious places. Now he was in Asia, Africa; amid the glare and ~ glitter of the bazaar; the smell and heat of the East choked his nostrils. It was Cairo now, and now Benares, and he was watching the ablutions of the devotees in the Holy River. He tried to fix his mind on these, here and there to reconstruct in full an incident; the tingling of the nautch girl’s ankle rings, the © twanging of the geisha’s samisen. Again he ~ saw across the long dark roll of sea (most won- — derful of sights!) Fuji peeping through the clouds, her snow-white crest tipped with sun flame. Now the Sphinx glared stonily at him —

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