The Sheik

Restless, Diana moved about the tent, listlessly examining objects that

she knew by heart, and flirting over the pages of the French magazines

she had read a dozen times. Usually she was thankful for his silent

moods. To-night with a woman's perversity she wanted him to speak. She

was unstrung, and the utter silence oppressed her. She glanced over her

shoulder at him once or twice, but his back looked unapproachable. Yet

when he called her, with a swift revulsion of feeling, she wished he

had kept silent. She went to him slowly. She was too unnerved to-night

to struggle against him. What would be the use? she thought wearily; it

would only end in defeat as it always did. He pulled her down on the

divan beside him, and before she realised what he was doing slipped a

long jade necklace over her head. For a moment she looked stupidly at

the wonderful thing, almost unique in the purity of its colour and the

marvellous carving on the uniform square pieces of which it was

composed, and then with a low cry she tore it off and flung it on the

ground.

"How dare you?" she gasped.

"You don't like it?" he asked in his low, unruffled voice, his eyebrows

raised in real or assumed surprise. "Yet it matches your dress," and

lightly his long fingers touched the folds of green silk swathed across

the youthful curve of her breast. He glanced at an open box filled with

shimmering stones on a low stool beside him.

"Pearls are too cold and diamonds too banal for you," he said slowly.

"You should wear nothing but jade. It is the colour of the evening sky

against the sunset of your hair."

He had never spoken like that to her before, or used that tone of

voice. His methods had been more fierce than tender. She glanced up

swiftly at his face, but it baffled her. There was no love in his eyes

or even desire, nothing but an unusual gentleness. "Perhaps you would

prefer the diamonds and the pearls," he went on, pointing disdainfully

at the box.

"No, no. I hate them! I hate them all! I will not wear your jewels. You

have no right to think that I am that kind of woman," she cried

hysterically.

"You do not like them? Bon Dieu! None of the other women ever

refused them. On the contrary, they could never get enough," he said

with a laugh.

Diana looked up with a startled glance, a look of horror dawning in her

eyes. "Other women?" she repeated blankly.