For half an hour the Count d’Eblis stood there, motionless in the moonlight. She came about that time, on the arm of Ferez Bey, her father’s friend of many years. And Ferez left her there in the creamy Turkish moonlight on the flowering terrace, alone with the Count d’Eblis. 12 When Ferez came again, long after midnight, with Excellenz on one arm and the proud and happy Adolf Gerhardt on the other, the whole cycle of a little drama had been played to a conclusion between those two shadowy figures under the flowering almonds on the terrace—between this slender, dark-eyed girl and this big, bulky, heavy-visaged man of the world. And the man had been beaten and the girl had laid down every term. And the compact was this: that she was to be launched in Paris; she was merely to borrow any sum needed, with privilege to acquit the debt within the year; that, if she ever came to care for this man sufficiently, she was to become only one species of masculine property—a legal wife. And to every condition—and finally even to the last, the man had bowed his heavy, burning head. “D’Eblis!” began Gerhardt, almost stammering in his joy and pride. “His highness tells me that I am to have an order—an Imperial d-decoration——” D’Eblis stared at him out of unseeing eyes; Nihla laughed outright, alas, too early wise and not even troubling her lovely head to wonder why a decoration had been asked for this burly, bushy-bearded man from nowhere. But within his sinuous, twisted soul Ferez writhed exultingly, and patted Gerhardt on the arm, and patted d’Eblis, too—dared even to squirm visibly closer to Excellenz, like a fawning dog that fears too much to venture contact in his wriggling demonstrations. “You take with you our pretty wonder-child to Paris to be launched, I hear,” remarked Excellenz, most affably, to d’Eblis. And to Nihla: “And upon a yacht fit for an emperor, I understand. Ach! Such a going forth is only heard of in the Arabian Nights. Eh 13 bien, ma petite, go West, conquer, and reign! It is a prophecy!” 13 And Nihla threw back her head and laughed her full-throated laughter under the Turkish moon. Later, Ferez, walking with the Ambassador, replied humbly to
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