Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast, where a month ago I began to write these latter pages.  Time has passed quickly since that day.

I said then that on the previous afternoon something had happened.  It was something which I might have foreseen, which, in fact, with my habit of putting the telescope to my blind eye, I obstinately had refused to foresee.  During our wanderings I had watched the flowering of her splendid beauty as she drank in health from the glow of her own Orient.  I had noted the widening of her intellect, the quickening of her sympathies.  I had been conscious of the expansion of her soul in the great silences when the stars flamed over the infinite sea of sand.  But a growing wistfulness that was no longer the old doglike pleading of her glorious eyes, a gathering sadness that was not an aftermath of grief for the child that had gone—­into this, if I did remark it, I did not choose to inquire.  Instead, I continued my study of Arabic and cultivated the acquaintance of a learned Moor whose conversation afforded—­and still affords—­me peculiar pleasure.  One of these days I shall make a book of his Table-talk.  But now I have to tell of Carlotta.

She accepted with alacrity my proposal that morning to ride over to the Palm Tree House for luncheon, as we had done several times before.  To please me, I think, she had resolutely overcome her natural indolence.  So much so that she had come to love the nomad life of steamers and caravans, and had grown restless, eager for fresh scenes, craving new impressions.  It was I who had cried a halt at Mogador where this furnished house to let, belonging to a German merchant absent in Europe, tempted me to rest awhile.  I am not so young as Carlotta, and I awakened to the fact of a circumambient universe so many years ago that I have grown slumberous.  Carlotta, if left to herself, would have gone on riding camels through Africa to the end of time.  She had changed in many essentials.  Instead of regarding me as an amiable purveyor of sweetmeats and other necessaries of life to which by the grace of her being Carlotta she was entitled, she treated me with human affection and sympathy, keeping her own wants in the background, anxious only to anticipate mine.  But she still loved sweetmeats and would eat horrible Moorish messes with an avidity only equalled by my repugnance.  She was still the same Carlotta.  On the other hand again, she had of late abandoned her caressing habits.  If she laid her hand on my arm, she did it timorously—­whereat I would laugh and she would grow confused.  Once she had driven me to frenzy with her fondling.  Those days had passed.  I told myself that I was as old as the sphinx we had moralised over in Egypt.

We lunched, then, at the Palm Tree House and rode back in the cool of the afternoon to Mogador.  We were alone, as we knew the path across the tongue of desert, and had no need of a guide and the rabble of sore-eyed urchins who, like their attendant flies, infest the tourist on his journeyings.  On our right the desert rose to meet a near horizon; on our left sandhills and boulders cut off the view; ahead the shimmering line beyond which the sea and city lay.  We were enveloped by solitude and stillness.  In the clear African air objects detached themselves against the sky with startling definition.