It struck Ryder that she was gotten up regardless.... In pride, perhaps, on her rival's wedding night?... Or had there been some defiant, desperate design upon Hamdi--?
She did not miss that sudden prolonging of his look upon her.
"You like me--yes?" she murmured, and then slipping back into the vernacular, "I--I am not the stupid veiled girl of the seclusion--not forever. I come from the west, the deserts. I have seen the world: Men--men, I know ... I danced before them, not the dances of the Cairene cafés," she uttered with swift scorn, "but the dance of the two swords, the dance of the serpents.... Men threw the gold from their turbans about my feet when I had danced to them ... And others, English, French--"
She broke off, but her eyes told many things. "Then--Hamdi," she said slowly. "Him I ruled--and his palace.... But I have known other things."
Closer yet she came to him. Her eyes, golden fires of eyes, were smiling up into his, her scarlet lips gathered in soft, sensual curves ... her whole silken scented body seemed to slip into his embrace. A bare arm touched his neck, resting heavily.
"Sweet--heart," she said slowly, in her difficult English.
No man can rudely snatch from his neck the arm of the lady who has just saved him from a harrowing death. And a lady who was risking more than her life in sheltering him--decidedly the situation was delicate.
It was not the lady's fault that her impetuosity, the impetuosity which had been his salvation, now plunged her into amorous caprice. There were obvious handicaps, moral, social and ethical, in her upbringing. She was a child of nature, a nature undisciplined, unruly, tempestuous.
And even queening over Hamdi and his palace must have offered little diversion to a wild dancing girl familiar with the excitement of more varied conquest.
Ryder was horribly embarrassed. He was visited with a fearful constraint, a chivalrous wish not to hurt her feelings, and a sharp prevision of the danger of offending her.
He took the first turn of least resistance.
He did not need to bend his head; their eyes were on a level. He simply kissed her. And she kissed him back.
He hated himself for the leap of his blood... and for the Puritanical discomfort of his nature....