sigh of relief as he sank into his seat. The dimness of the light,
the quiet, the coolness all pleased him: he had not known till he
sat down how tired he was. He might have sat there a quarter of an
hour, his mind in that state of hopeless blank that supervenes on
overmuch unsatisfactory thinking, when suddenly the tom-toms
started up again with a terrific rattle, and the scarlet curtain
was somewhat spasmodically jerked up, displaying a semicircle of
girls seated on European chairs facing the tin lamps. Two of the
seven were African girls, with the woolly hair and jet black skin
of their race; they were seated one at each end of the semicircle,
dressed in short scarlet skirts, standing out from their waist in
English ballet-girl fashion, the upper part of their bodies bare,
except for the masses of coloured glass necklaces covering their
breast from throat to waist. The next pair of girls seemed to
represent Spanish dancers, and were in ankle-long black and yellow
dresses, little yellow caps with bells depending from them sat in
amongst their masses of black hair, and they held languidly to
their sides their tambourines and castenets. Next on the chairs sat
two strictly Eastern dancers in transparent pale green gauzy
clothing held into waist and each ankle by jeweled bands. Their
pale ivory bodies shone through the filmy green muslin as the moon
shines clearly in green water, and the jewels blazed like stars
with red and blue fires at each movement of their limbs. Their
heads were crowned simply with white clematis, and the glory of
their straight-featured Circassian faces, together with the
unrivalled contours of softly moulded throat and breast and perfect
limbs, veiled only so much as a light mist may veil, would have
taken the breath away of the most inveterate frequenter of the
Alhambra and Empire in dull old England. Hamilton drew in his
breath with a little start as he first saw the semicircle, but it