Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/73

Rh and mentally he praised her courage, for she was pain-racked, but ignoring it.

"Until we know each other better?" he echoed. "That won't be long, if you will let me call. May I come tomorrow?"

"If you wish," she bent her head in assent.

It was not until they'd said good night and he was half-way home that realization filtered through his thought. "Not now, Hugh," she'd denied him when he pleaded for her confidence. They had met less than an hour before, he and this woman from a Cairene harem; he was certain Conover had not used his Christian name at introduction, yet she had known it, she had called him Hugh; his name had dropped unbidden from her as she struggled to control emotion.

ripened quickly between Hugh Abernathy and Ismet Foulik. It began next morning when he called to take her riding. Smiling and frankly glad to see him, she looked younger and much smaller, almost child-like, in her breeches of white gabardine, white silk shirt left open at the throat and long boots of black kid which cased her high-arched, narrow feet and slender legs. In place of a belt she wore a brilliantly embroidered orange scarf twined three times round her waist; her bright fair hair was covered with a silken kerchief blocked in orchid and pistache, edged with seed pearls and twisted like a turban.

She rode with practised ease, which amazed him. How could a woman born and bred in the seclusion of the harem have learned the art of horsemanship so thoroughly in one year of emancipation?

He saw as much of her as his work at the museum would permit, and each succeeding meeting added to his fascination, and his wonder. She was in his blood like some unconquerable drug; her beauty and her perfume made his senses reel when he was with her; the vision of her cameo-clear features and her sometimes merry, sometimes pleading, often frightened eyes swam between him and his books and manuscripts or the tiny, priceless things he catalogued.

Ismet Ismet. She seemed the axis upon which his life revolved. Ismet in a backless, strapless evening gown, dancing with him on the roofs or at the supper clubs; Ismet in printed crêpe with white suede gloves and a pert, small hat which might have graced a Watteau shepherdess smiling her slow smile at him across the luncheon table; Ismet on the tennis court in shorts and halter, her glowing golden skin as vital as the sun that kissed it; Ismet in a molded lastex bathing-suit, diving like an otter and swimming like a seal.

Every day her mystery increased. She would be laughing, gay almost to recklessness; then suddenly her mood would change and the laugh-lights vanish from her eyes as the pupils seemed to swell and spread with fear until they were like disks of ebony—dull, lusterless, opaque, expressionless. Sometimes as she spoke blithely she would halt abruptly and look round her with an apprehensive glance, and at such times he could see the tremor of horripilation ripple through her vibrant skin as though a sudden gelid wind blew on her.

One evening as they strolled along the boardwalk after dinner at the shore the band burst into a quick medley of school songs. The music brought him memories of a hundred football games, of nights of study, nights of dancing,