hold them diminished. Safiyeh was a mere inexperienced child--
yet Agapoulos had brought her to the house, and Zahara, wise in
woman's lore, had recognized the familiar change of manner.

It was a great problem, the age-old problem which doubtless set
the first silver thread among Phryne's red-gold locks and which
now brought a little perplexed wrinkle between Zahara's
delicately pencilled brows.

It had not always been so. In those early days in Cairo there
had been an American boy. Zahara had never forgotten. Her
beauty had bewildered him. He had wanted to take her to New
York; and oh! how she had wanted to go. But her mother, who was
then alive, had held other views, and he had gone alone.
Heavens! How old she felt. How many had come and gone since
that Egyptian winter, but now, although admiration was fatally
easy to win how few were so sincere as that fresh-faced boy from
beyond the Atlantic.

Zahara, staring into the mirror, observed that there was not a
wrinkle upon her face, not a flaw upon her perfect skin. Nor in
this was she blinded by vanity. Nature, indeed, had cast her in
a rare mould, and from her unusual hair, which was like dull
gold, to her slender ankles and tiny feet, she was one of the
most perfectly fashioned human beings who ever added to the
beauty of the world.

Yet Agapoulos preferred Safiyeh. Zahara could hear him coming to
her room even as she sat there, chin in hands, staring at her own
bewitching reflection. Presently she would slip out and speak to