A woman's laugh, low and exquisitely musical, rippled on the air
as he spoke--delicious laughter, rarer than song; for women as a
rule laugh too loudly, and the sound of their merriment partakes
more of the nature of a goose's cackle than any other sort of
natural melody. But this large, soft and silvery, was like a
delicately subdued cadence played on a magic flute in the
distance, and suggested nothing but sweetness; and at the sound of
it Gervase started violently and turned sharply round upon his
friend Murray with a look of wonderment and perplexity.

"Who is that?" he demanded. "I have heard that pretty laugh
before; it must be some one I know."

But Denzil scarcely heard him. Pale, and with eyes full of
yearning and passion, he was watching the slow approach of a group
of people in fancy dress, who were all eagerly pressing round one
central figure--the figure of a woman clad in gleaming golden
tissues and veiled in the old Egyptian fashion up to the eyes,
with jewels flashing about her waist, bosom and hair,--a woman who
moved glidingly as if she floated rather than walked, and whose
beauty, half hidden as it was by the exigencies of the costume she
had chosen, was so unusual and brilliant that it seemed to create
an atmosphere of bewilderment and rapture around her as she came.
She was preceded by a small Nubian boy in a costume of vivid
scarlet, who, walking backwards humbly, fanned her slowly with a
tall fan of peacock's plumes made after the quaint designs of
ancient Egypt. The lustre radiating from the peacock's feathers,
the light of her golden garments, her jewels and the marvellous
black splendor of her eyes, all flashed for a moment like sudden
lightning on Gervase; something--he knew not what--turned him