voice suggested flutes.

She smiled, and her teeth were whiter than a pipe-clayed sword-belt;
there is nothing on earth whiter than her teeth were.

"Colonel Kirby and Captain Warrington" said Kirby.

"Will the sahibs state their business?"

"No!"

"Then whom do the sahibs seek to see?"

"Does a lady live here named Yasmini?"

"Surely, sahib."

"I wish to talk with her."

A dozen little maids seemed to step back through a dozen swaying
curtains, and a second later for the life of them they could neither
of them tell through which it was that the music came and the smell
of musk and sandal-smoke. But she came back and beckoned to them,
laughing over her shoulder and holding the middle curtain apart for
them to follow.

So, one after the other, they followed her, Kirby--as became a
seriously-minded colonel on the eve of war--feeling out of place and
foolish, but Warrington, possessed by such a feeling of curiosity as
he had never before tasted.