"
"If you'll take one more tip from me, I'd leave her mind alone for the
present."
"Why, you flinty-hearted reprobate?"
"Well, I'm no authority. But all's fair in love and war. And sometimes
an outsider sees features of the game which the players don't see."
"That's true, anyhow," Nevill agreed. "Let's _both_ remember that--eh?"
and he got up from the table abruptly, as if to keep Stephen from
answering, or asking what he meant.
They had several empty hours, between the time of finishing luncheon,
and five o'clock, when they were to meet Mademoiselle Soubise and her
chaperon, so they took Josette's advice and went sightseeing.
Preoccupied as he was, Stephen could not be indifferent to the
excursion, for Tlemcen is the shrine of gems in Arab architecture, only
equalled at Granada itself. Though he was so ignorant still of eastern
lore, that he hardly knew the meaning of the word mihrab, the arched
recess looking towards Mecca, in the Mosque of the lawyer-saint Aboul
Hassan, held him captive for many moments with its beauty. Its
ornamentation was like the spread tail of Nevill's white peacock, or the
spokes of a silver wheel incrusted with an intricate pattern in jewels.
Not a mosque in town, or outside the gates, did they leave unvisited,
lest, as Nevill said, Josette Soubise should ask embarrassing questions;
and the last hour of probation they gave to the old town. There, as they
stopped to look in at the workshops of the weavers, and the bakers, or
stared at the hands of Fatma-Zora painted in henna on the doors of Jews
and True Believers, crowds of ragged boys and girls followed them,
laughing and begging as gaily as if begging were a game.
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