The Lighted Match

"Allah is good to me--Flamencine," whispered the camel-driver as he drew

her close to avoid a careless dancer.

"Why, Flamencine?" demanded a carefully altered voice, from which,

however, the music had not been eliminated.

"Don't you remember?" The Arab stole a covert, identifying glance down

at the tip of one ear which showed under its masking of brown hair--an

ear that looked as though it were chiseled from the pink coral of

Capri. He quoted: "'There was a gipsy maiden within the forest green,

There was a gipsy maiden who shook a tambourine.

The stars of night had not the face,

The woodland wind had not the grace,

Of Flamencine.'"

Then the music stopped, and with its silencing came the monk, the clown,

the grandee, and others.

In the insistent demand of the many the Arab had too few dances with the

Spanish girl. There were Comanches, Samurai, policemen, Zulus and

courtiers, who, seeing her dance, discovered that their immediate

avocation was dancing with her.

Yet it wanted an hour of unmasking time when a Bedouin led a gipsy

maiden from Andalusia into the deserted library, where the darkness was

broken only by blazing logs on an open hearth.

When they were alone he turned to her anxiously. His voice was freighted

with appeal. Her face, now unmasked, wore an expression of stunned

misery.

"Dear," he asked, "how are you?"

She gazed at the flickering logs. "I should think you would know," she

answered wearily. Then, with a mirthless laugh, she spread both hands

toward the blaze. "I'm looking ahead--I can see it all there in the

fire." Her fingers convulsively clenched themselves until blue marks

showed against the pink palms.

He pushed a chair forward for her, but with a shake of her head she

declined it.

"Whoever heard of a gipsy girl sitting in a leather chair?" she

demanded. "It's more like--like some effete princess."

She dropped to the Persian rug and, gathering her knees between her

clasped hands, sat looking into the dying blaze. "For a few brief

minutes I am the gipsy girl," she added.

"And," he said, dropping cross-legged to the rug at her side, "when the

caravan halts at evening, and prayers have been said facing Mecca, and

the grunting camels kneel, to be unloaded, neither do we, the gipsies of

the desert, sit in chairs." He swayed slightly toward her, lowering his

voice to a whisper. As the soft touch of her shoulder brushed him and

electrified him, his cashmere-draped arms closed around her and held her

hungrily to him. The vagrant maiden of Andalusia and the caravan-driver

of Africa sat gazing together at the glowing pictures in the logs as

they turned slowly to ashes.

"Cara," he went on in a voice of pent-up earnestness, "we be nomads--we

two. 'The scarlet of the maples can shake us like the cry of bugles

going by.' Come away with me while there is time. Let us follow out our

destinies where gipsy blood calls us; in the desert, the jungle,

wherever you say. Let your fancy be our guide--your heart our compass.

Suppose"--he paused and, with one outstretched arm, pointed to the

fire--"suppose that to be a camp-fire--what do you see in the coals?"