It was almost dark under the trees as we re-entered the woods; I pulled out a cheroot and lit it.  Isaacs did the same, and we walked our horses along in silence.  I was thinking of the little picture I had just seen.  The splendid English girl on her thoroughbred beside the beautiful Arab steed and his graceful rider.  What a couple, I thought:  what noble specimens of great races.  Why did not this fiery young Persian, with his wealth, his beauty, and his talents, wed some such wife as that, some high-bred Englishwoman, who should love him and give him home and children—­and, I was forced to add, commonplace happiness?  How often does it happen that some train of thought, unacknowledged almost to ourselves, runs abruptly into a blind alley; especially when we try to plan out the future life of some one else, or to sketch for him what we should call happiness.  The accidental confronting of two individuals pleases the eye, we unite them in our imagination, carrying on the picture before us, and suddenly we find ourselves in a quagmire of absurd incongruities.  Now what could be more laughable than to suppose the untamed, and probably untameable young man at my side, with his three wives, his notions about the stars and his Mussulman faith, bound for life to a girl like Miss Westonhaugh?  A wise man of the East trying to live the life of an English country gentleman, hunting in pink and making speeches on the local hustings!  I smiled to myself in the dark and puffed at my cigar.

Meanwhile Isaacs was palpably uneasy.  First he kicked his feet free of the stirrups, and put them back again.  Then he hummed a few words of a Persian song and let his cigar go out, after which he swore loudly in Arabic at the eternal matches that never would light.  Finally he put his horse into a hand gallop, which could not last on such a road in the dark, and at last he broke down completely in his efforts to do impossible things, and began talking to me.

“You know Mr. Ghyrkins by correspondence, then?”

“Yes, and by controversy.  And you, I see, know Miss Westonhaugh?”

“Yes; what do you think of her?”

“A charming creature of her type.  Fair and English, she will be fat at thirty-five, and will probably paint at forty, but at present she is perfection—­of her kind of course,” I added, not wishing to engage my friend in the defence of his three wives on the score of beauty.

“I see very little of Englishwomen,” said Isaacs.  “My position is peculiar, and though the men, many of whom I know quite intimately, often ask me to their houses, I fancy when I meet their women I can detect a certain scorn of my nationality, a certain undefinable manner toward me, by which I suppose they mean to convey to my obtuse comprehension that I am but a step better than a ’native’—­a ‘nigger’ in fact, to use the term they love so well.  So I simply avoid them, as a rule, for my temper is hasty.  Of course I understand