Julie was entering again the Arabian Nights’ city. It lay emblazoned in the light of a blood red torrid sun fast sinking behind a towering mountain that uprose out of wide stretching plains already shadowy under the first sprinkling of dusk. Through the streets of the City, the many races of the earth were moving in slow crooked currents. Back in the charmed City to stay! Back in the midst of the Empire-builders and the destiny of the enigmatic East!

Julie expected to go to one of the hostelries of the City. There were a number of them, of which the Oriente was by far the best known and most brilliant. It harbored under its palmy roof people from all corners of the world, and was the stage for a great deal of the drama of the East. There were Australians and New Zealanders, come up to see what the Americans were making of things and to have a bit of fun nearer than Europe; Hindoo rajahs with their trains, who had unaccountably found their way here; Chinese and Japanese officials bound, in silence, on their inconjectural errands. Manila was glitteringly cosmopolitan. It was just now attracting the eye of all the East, and picturesque people coursed in and out of it like a strange spice. Almost all of this throng found refuge in the Oriente. Not foreigners alone made lively this resort. There was the City’s own strange population; and exiles from the bosque were there seeking nepenthe for their souls in the dancing and music of its plaza, in its life and love. No old colonial of to-day can pass the still gates of this closed pavilion of pleasure without a pang for the vivid era of the past.

But this glittering khan Julie would be forced to pass by. Aside from the prices, high in those prodigal days of the Empire, the great hostelry, while respectable, held a much too vivid representation of Anglo-Asian life for a solitary girl.

The ship was wharfing. Julie perceived a conspicuous equipage waiting on the pier. Beside its white-liveried coachman sat an unbelievably small figure which was turning its strange miniature individuality about on the box. Isabel’s queer dwarf! He must have seen Julie, for in an instant he was burrowing his way through the travelers. Soon he was standing before her, extending a letter and nodding his uncanny little face up at her.

The note was from Isabel. She had written it just before setting out on some enterprise, and as she had intimated before would not be at home to receive Julie; but she had made all arrangements for Julie to remain in her house.

The dwarf gesticulated towards the carriage with one of his elfin hands. Delphine looking about him at all the wonder uttered an exclamation. The dwarf, glancing at him quickly, spoke to him in the same dialect. They began to chatter to each other.

The mannikin, Delphine excitedly informed Julie, had been born on the Island of Nahal.

The village of Guindulman—did they know it? the dwarf asked. Julie told him that she had lived there for some time. It was from there that he had been stolen as a child, and made a slave.

Guindulman remained as a bright spot in his memory; his little nut of a face transformed under the glow of reminiscences.

He and his mother and his sister had all been scattered in the raid of a band of Moros, and he had never seen either of them again.

A recollection seized on Julie. “What was your sister’s name?”

“Nemecia Victoria—she was a child.”

“Oh!” Delphine joyously put in, “she is there now—a pretty lady; and very rich—with so many friends!”

Julie gave Delphine an arresting look.

The dwarf trembled a little. “My sister is alive!—and well off!” he murmured.

“Yes,” Julie replied. To her relief, he did not ask any more questions.

“Will you then go back to her?”

The dwarf turned away. “What is to be, will be. I have been everywhere with my mistress—even to England. I will not leave—” he muttered to himself.

Julie drew Delphine aside, and cautioned him what he should say of Nemecia. Delphine listened attentively under the shadow of a dreadfully civilized little derby hat, which had evidently accompanied the new camisa, and demanded permission to tell his new friend of the Peace that had come about in Nahal and of the part his Maestra and Nemecia had played in it.

Julie sat back comfortably in the carriage, with a feeling of gratitude toward Isabel. The hotels other than the Oriente were neither good nor picturesque, and from one of these Isabel had saved her. Her reflections were cut short by the sight of an urgent face making its way toward her through the crowd—though it was not until a black habit appeared in conjunction with the face that Julie recognized the painfully emaciated features of Father Hull.

“I’m late!” he exclaimed, extending his hand to her, and taking in the carriage with a dissatisfied glance. “They misinformed me at the steamship office as to the arrival of the boat.

“I had a carromata waiting for you,” he suggested. “I have also made arrangements with some Spanish-Mestizo friends of mine for your lodging. Suitable accommodations are always hard to procure in Manila, and I strongly advise you to take advantage of this opportunity—especially as it is in the district to which you will probably be assigned.

“Unfortunately,” he added, knitting his brows at the carriage, “the Reredos are not immediately prepared—and an unprepared Spaniard is a serious thing. One cannot walk in and out of their households after the fashion we have at home. They lack the quality of casualness.

“In the meantime, I know of a very good hotel where you can pass a few days at a very reasonable rate.”

Julie informed him that the carriage she was in belonged to Mrs. Armistead, a friend of hers, who had invited her to remain in her house till its owner returned from a trip. She believed it would be ungracious not to accept the hospitality offered. Part of her baggage, moreover, was installed in the carriage, and arrangements made for the rest of it. Privately Julie had no desire to go to a cheap hotel when a chance at that wonderful house was offered.

The priest appeared to consider, in troubled thought. Rather reluctantly, Julie thought, he consented to the arrangement. He said he would communicate later with her concerning the school. Then he lifted his hat and moved away.

Julie had wanted to ask him about Barry, but had not found the opportunity.

As the carriage drove away, the dwarf and Delphine—who was clutching Balthazar, too stupefied from the trip to be troublesome—sat close together, talking rapidly. The dwarf occasionally stole a shyly appreciative glance at Julie.

Julie passed across the city, coursing through its dusky streets, in a mood of subtle excitement. Everywhere she was met by the Change! Not a change that assailed the physical senses, but one that transcended them: a subtle, widespread intimation that quivered on some inner receptivity. Not the altered streets, the new buildings, the material renovation, gave it forth so much as the peculiar quickening of the atmosphere through which the soul of these people seemed to suspire. How can one trace the leaven in the bread or follow through the far filaments of thought a psychic metamorphosis? Yet there it was. The very stones of the pavement proclaimed it. The Resurrection was stirring through the worn kingdoms of men, and the blood of the Builders coursed beneath it all like the rivers of life!

Every moment Julie thrilled deeply to what she saw. The Builders were beginning to fulfil. Here in this single corner the stagnant spirit of the East was awaking to life. Wars might be fought in the future, and races degraded and aggrandized, but the spreading influences of this endeavor would reach far into the future of men.

Again she found herself in that perfumed garden before the sweep of Babylonian pillars with the shimmering palace lifting like a jeweled Taj Mahal out of the mystery of the thick, soft night—and the giant trees and scented shadows, and the bamboo chanting to the forthcoming stars. The mansion of the Caliph!

She stepped softly up the flights of stairs into the great lengths of chambers, glowing under dim lights with the rich acquisitions of strange lands. The house was all sheer beauty, exquisitely compiled. The river came up to the verdant banks on its rear. Mystical, shadow-banked, it set the senses quivering. The surroundings stirred Julie like the confused beauty of Eastern music, and brought up dim, poetic suggestions of Queens of Sheba and Scheherezades and the unending dynasties of kings—of the poetry and the romance of old, unchanging things.

She ate her dinner, a solitary figure, at a huge banquet table of shining nara set forth with Indian silver, delicately carved with the loves and conquests of maharajahs and goddesses. After dinner, she wandered about fascinated. What a triumph Isabel had made of the house. What a marvelous woman, indeed, she was!

She stopped short in a chamber of shining carvings, slow wrought wonders of a land where hands were cheaper than tools, and life was the cheapest of all. From the midst of the labor of these unvalued hands, she caught the glimmer of a strange little figure with bent head, shining stilly out of the dusk. The Green God! Beautiful, terrible, Lord of the Eastern universe—to whom myriads of souls were fastened in supreme faith. With what awful power he was invested by their belief! She had walked upon him unawares, and now hurried to get away.

As she emerged disquieted into the main sala, a head thrust itself softly, like a projected shadow, above the old Spanish balustrade of the stairs. The body did not appear and the head paused only long enough to startle Julie. A dark, aged human vision. In the fleeting look she could not tell whether it was the face of a man or a woman; but there had been a flash from the depths of that being that had frightened the girl. It was gone, and she calmed again. After all, in the East, all sorts of unexpected faces peer at one from odd corners.

Later Julie tried to question the dwarf. Who was the old being she had seen? Did it pop in and out of people’s houses at will? Did his Mistress know anything about her? Dicky-Dicky, the dwarf, looked at her with inscrutable eyes, and knew nothing. Julie decided to say no more about it.

The next day Isabel appeared. Vividly beautiful like some bright houri, she came smiling to the gallery where Julie was sitting. “I am happy to see that you have found your way back to us!” She kissed Julie with her perfumed lips. Then she stood back and regarded her. “Ah, my poor little friend, you have changed! A hard time is written all over you, and you are too thin for your clothes. Poor little dust-covered Atlas! Tell me about it. I love all brave journeys. But first we will have lunch. I am starved. I have had a long trip.”

“From your letter, I thought you would be gone longer.”

“I have been off on a secret glorious errand to a place of which you shall never dream. You would have to have the East in you for that. I have been building paradise to suit myself, bit by bit. The kind of paradise you think of is made for every one, for all sorts of people you couldn’t get along with on earth—so why, I ask, repeat the experiment in the courts of God?

“Nor is paradise for one alone, my friend. It is for the comrades of our souls, scattered sometimes as far as the ends of the rainbow. There are a few golden beings that in some eternal citadel we should hold fast. Do you think—” she exclaimed suddenly—“that if I climbed to the arch of Heaven by my nails I could capture the one great friend of my soul?”

Her tone changed. “I came back. I hungered for Manila. It holds the world for me.”

“It is Scheherezade’s city—full of wonderful adventures!” Julie declared with shining eyes. “I wonder,” she mused, “what it holds for me?”

They seated themselves at the table before golden iced mangoes. The huge silver bowl in the center was loaded with great scarlet blossoms whose perfume saturated the Air. They seemed to faint under their own fragrance, for Julie observed that while dewily fresh at the commencement of the meal, they were all but dead at the close.

“Nothing here lives an hour after you pick it,” Isabel dissatisfiedly remarked. “But the quick new buds replace the blossoms almost in a breath. I am glad I have no children, to crowd me out. I like the flowers of Europe. You can wear them all day and then keep them on in water. Life is longer over there. Here we have only our hour. But such an hour! Take you and me at thirty-five! You will be young—a cold storage sort of youth—and I, well, it is written in the stars and the heart of the Green God where I shall be—but I shall have lived, oh, very splendidly little Atlas, while you will only have drawn breath.”

After luncheon she put on a nÉgligÉ of lustrous silk and flung herself on a couch, her splendid black Malay hair loosened about her, a cigarette in her lips.

“There is a water carnival at the Palace to-morrow night, and the question of your costume must be settled at once. It is late, and all the tailors are over-crowded with orders. I am afraid too that I may not be able to get you into a boat. I might take you in my float, but that would necessitate darkening you up, and it would not do to obscure your little ray of light.

“You might be gotten up as Saturn, with filmy rings. But the nebulÆ would prevent you from dancing. I have it! You shall be a Pleiad. I have seen a picture of them leaning over the edge of the world, out of the mists of the sky, and you look like that! You can be a Pleiad quite conveniently, too, with folds of moonlight mist, some sandals, and a star. It only involves buying a roll of gauze from an East Indian. I have a star among my things, and we can find some sandals.

“And now—” she urged, laying lightly compelling fingers on Julie’s arm, “tell me about it! Tell me everything that took place down there—and afterwards, forget it forever. There are no memories in Scheherezade’s city.”

This was Julie’s first opportunity to unburden her soul, and she was still surcharged with what had happened. Some one else might be able to understand; some one else might be able to make things clear. So under the stimulus of Isabel’s fragrant liqueur her innermost amazements and hurts burst into speech.

Isabel’s blue eyes lost their dreamy expression, and came acutely awake, her cigarette burned unheeded, while Julie’s sorrows, perplexities, and final confoundment of soul passed in array before her. When the girl had finished and had sunk back into the old stupid questioning wonder, Isabel exclaimed:

“Great is the Green God! Never say he is not kind. Surely he led you out of it. Don’t regret the stone image that let you starve under its eyes! There was more to come, little Atlas. You have something different in you—something very nearly divine. I feel it at my finger’s ends; though I don’t want it to come any nearer than that poetical distance. It is bringing you some place, and it was not meant that your destiny should halt where you perhaps believe it should. I am a prophet, you see. If I were not Empress of the East, as they say, I should travel as a prophetess through the land—like my mother. You have heard of her—how she gave up her wealth to wander and foretell? She too dreams of the Victorious East.”

Julie regarded this magnificence of mood with wonder. All manner of men, it was said, had loved Isabel; and in some peculiar way their lives had seemed to be bound up in her colorful personality—as if her sphinx-like spirit had devoured and assimilated their souls. Her mood was always an extravagant expectation of more than could be reasonably aspired to by any one person.

“Ah, what do you know about men?” Isabel suddenly exclaimed. “To hear you is like listening to the forgotten primer of one’s childhood. Nevertheless, there was long ago just such another as yourself, one as piteously credulous and blind.”

Suddenly an alien Isabel rose before the girl, an apparition of which the suppressed terribleness frightened her as if some strange phoenix had risen from its ashes before her eyes.

“You have told me your story. Now I shall tell you one of mine—a buried story of my old, old self. There are perhaps many turns yet in the course, but long after I shall have forgotten everything else, this one memory somehow shall remain.

“Maybe I had the promise of a soul then. I was a little Eurasian, with the happy blood of both races charging gayly through my veins. And I believed tremendously, Atlas, just like you. Ah—!

“I was born in this house of my ancestors. My father was a Scotchman, of their best clan; my mother was of the East. All its bloods flowed in her veins. I was taken young to England—and there,” Isabel said slowly, “my mother disappeared. I came to love my father’s land. I went to the schools there, and dreamed great things. Sometime I too should play a fine part in the world. Every man, I thought, had his destiny in his own hands.

“It was all a long time ago. Of the seasons I remember vividly only the time when the primroses open and the English hedge-lark is aboard.” A fierce blue mist veiled the flashing eyes. “Life dies and resurrects itself in England. Every year one is born anew.

“The man was an officer in an English regiment—fair as the daylight. On my knees I used to worship him as a god. Nobody suspected what I was, and I did not myself understand. He loved me, too—with the kind of love the English understand. No fire, no poetry in it—the love that is just strong enough to manufacture a few pink-cheeked children for their tidy British homes. I loved him as we of the East know how to love.

“In Europe one marries not merely a man, but a family. How different from my mother’s land, where mates find each other under the sun! Yet they call it civilization over there. Well, his family grew suspicious. They had heard tales of my father’s wild youth in strange parts of the world. It sometimes happens that one must pay a very heavy price for one’s father’s youth.

“The only retort my father could make was a bigger dowry. But I was different. I had then sublime ideas of honesty of soul. My lover, I believed, would love me the more exaltedly for them. I acknowledged my Malay blood—all the bloods of the East that ran through me. I stood up against the wall and did it in a great splendor of mood.

“Ah! You know the rest. When they, when he—that European matrimonial compound threw me off, I did everything that a woman of your race would not have done. I threw myself in his path at every turn—offered myself to him on any terms; for I knew now that never could I exact terms at all.

“And he took me on the lowest. West—East; it is always the same. He got himself ordered to India. That last night!” Isabel sat up straight. “I crept along the brush of the lane into which he was to turn. An Igorotte from the Mountains had taught me how to catch my foe. I slid out when he came! I would have killed him, but the knife was poor. I only wounded him. I had meant to kill us both, but—” Isabel nonchalantly threw open the nÉgligÉ, and exposed a large scar—“we go on, do we not, Green God of the Universe?” She turned her head toward the room where the preposterous idol lived.

To this narrative, told with oriental fervor, of things quite as beyond her experience of existence as the pits of Erebus, Julie had listened in a conflict of emotions.

“The priest will tell you many things about me—among them that a young man killed himself here for me not long ago. Men may have killed themselves because of me, but not Grahaeme. He killed himself, not because he was in love with me, but because he couldn’t alter the universe to an Englishman’s idea—because I was what I shall eternally remain—an Eurasian, a mongrel! You see, your Englishman can gloriously destroy himself, but he can’t sacrifice his caste. Grahaeme was jaded by the East, and he took me to die for. I would never again accept low terms. A Ghengis Khan, perhaps—or—” She stopped short. “Yes, I will be unchangeably I, till the end. It is so decreed. There is something about you, though, that stirs me, and makes me wish that one died like the English summer and came up anew with the spring.”

Julie rose, and in a surge of feeling looked down upon the recumbent figure. For a bare moment Isabel had opened the very secret gate and let her glimpse in. The girl laid her hand on the olive shoulder.

“Those things—make no difference to me,” she said diffidently. “We will always be friends.”

Isabel glanced up at her ironically. “Is that a covenant? Go away, little friend, with your spring insistence! There is no resurrection here. And Europe shall never see me again! Once I wrote quaint lyrics, full, they said, of the magic and mystery of the East; now I am preparing a volume that is not written on pages—of things that must shortly stir the race of men. ‘Waters dried up that the way of the Kings of the East shall be prepared!’ Alpha and Omega. Here the struggle of man began, and here it will end! And ‘he who shall come, taking the peace from the earth, and making kings’! Great resurrected Ghengis Khan! Where is he? In what recess of Asia is he making ready to sweep the East to victory? Him my soul awaits. He will put the sun and moon under my feet!

“Half of this world will not sleep forever. The sleepers of the East will touch their bonds and find them rotten—the senile hold of their foreign masters! Then there shall be such a conflagration as will scatter the very stars.”

Isabel coming suddenly back from her feverish flight, looked up at Julie. “Are you ill?” she demanded.

Julie put her hands to her head and pressed it hard, her lids drawing together with pain. “I had a sunstroke in Nahal, and ever since I’ve had a headache. Sometimes it aches as if it would split my brain.”

Isabel pointed to the adjoining room. “Go and lie down! When you get up the sunlight will be dimmed, and you will be better.”

Julie dropped down on a bed that was a mass of crawling teakwood dragons. All over the walls, from queer prints etched as with a single hair, gazed fantastic human apparitions wearing their limbs and features in most extraordinary ways, all supremely triumphant over space and perspective. Draperies of embroidered landscapes, fine as old etchings, disclosed temples of woven gold, rivers as fantastic as dreams, and blue mountains over which the mysticism of the East hung like dew.

She drowsed, and presently the temples of gold threads expanded into pavilions like the markets she had seen in the city, and millions of people, thick as flies, passed in and out.

She awoke, and her eyes rested on Isabel, who had so agitated her brain with strange prophecies and visions. The long hair, black as the jungle at night, lay curved over her beautiful body; the blue eyes that judged etchings and old prints were closed, curtained by heavy lids. The soul seemed to be withdrawn to inaccessible retreats, afar off perhaps beating its wings against inexorable walls. Only the mask of the East looked out from the inert form. The Malay woman lay there asleep—the woman that could track her enemy, and kill.