above her head.

"For God's sake get up!" I shrieked, wrenching her back
acrobatically to the bench beside me. "You mustn't do things
like that. You'll have the whole of London running to look at
us."

Indeed the sight had so far roused the pale young man from his
lethargy that he laid his dirty pink paper on his knees. I kept
hold of Carlotta's wrists. She began to moan incoherently.

"You mustn't send me back--Hamdi will kill me--oh please don't
send me back--he will make me marry his friend Mustapha--Mustapha
has only two teeth--and he is seventy years old--and he has a
wife already--I only went with Harry to avoid Mustapha. Hamdi
would kill me, he would beat me, he would make me marry
Mustapha."

That is what I gathered from her utterances. She was frightened
out of her wits, even into anticlimax.

"But the Turkish Consul is your natural protector," said I.

"You wouldn't be so cruel," she sobbed. The guttural sonority
with which she rolled the "r" in "cruel" made the epithet appear
one of revolting barbarity. She fixed those confounded eyes upon
me.

I wonder whether such a fool as I has ever lived.