Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/77

Rh hands and feet and throat—an unfamiliar, long-forgotten feeling he had not experienced since years before when as a lad in first long trousers he had paused irresolute upon the steps that led up to his sweetheart's house.

The curtains had been tightly drawn across her windows, but here and there a little ray of light seeped out, and through the draperies came the soft, light tones of a piano. She was singing the Chanson Solvejg from Peer Gynt, and her clear, high voice went rippling through the long-sustained cadenza. Somehow the flute-like, faintly grieving notes made him think of someone walking barefoot and erect and esthetic beneath a flooding radiance of moonlight.

Candlelight and firelight mingled in the drawing-room and shone on loved, familiar objects—Chinese and Copenhagen porcelains, mahogany and brocade, ash-trays of cloisonne, sandalwood-and-silver cigarette containers, Persian rugs, the baby grand piano enameled à la Greuze. Like moon-radiance the blended light shone on the woman who rose from the instrument as he paused at the threshold.

in midstride as if he had mistaken solid wall for doorway, and he could feel the pupils of his eyes expand as he looked at her. Nothing but her name had ever hinted Ismet's Eastern origin; her clothes, her speech, her manner were as Western as the Boulevard des Italiens, New Bond Street or Park Avenue. The woman who stood facing him was an Oriental of the Orientals, completely Eastern as an odalisque who never in her life had stepped unveiled outside the confines of the haremlik. More, she would have been a challenge to St. Anthony.

Beneath a Nile-green overdress of filmy, shimmering sheerness she wore a kaftan of pale golden tissue which clung sheath-like to her slim figure; pear-shaped emeralds trembled in her ears; above the little feet in bright red slippers stitched in seed pearls which peeped beneath the amorous golden folds he saw the gleam of heavy golden anklets. Circling her head was a gold chain composed of alternating small and large links like a slave bracelet, and from it six pendants hung down her forehead nearly to her brows—turquoise, garnet, opal, beryl, topaz, aquamarine—pear-formed and glittering they caught and held, then threw back, gleams of candlelight and fireglow; a diamond solitaire at least three carats heavy gleamed in the nose-stud fixed in her left nostril. The heavy fragrance of ambergris, like a breath from the seraglio, hung about her like a cloud.

"Es-salaam, ya Sidi!" She gave the greeting gravely, her eyes downcast, and he noted that her lids were stained a grapeskin purple and had the luster of old silk.

His pulses jumped like startled rabbits; a wave of weakness, almost sickness, ran through him. Why this masquerade yet was it masquerade? Was not this the real Ismet, and the other whom he knew and loved a passing interlude, a summer whim which had been put away with autumn's coming?

He laid his hand upon the doorpost. His scientifically trained mind, usually so orderly, was scrambled as a trash-drawer, there was a tightness in his throat, his head felt larger than his scalp. By her pose and manner, no less than by her clothes and jewelry, she had put a gulf between them wider than the distance from New York to Cairo. "Ismet," he muttered, and his