"Diane, _dear_!" exclaimed Ann Sherrill one lazy morning, "what in the _world_ is that exceedingly mournful tune you're humming?"
"That," said Diane, "is the 'Song of the Great Horned Owl,' my clever little Indian friend taught me. Isn't it plaintive?"
"It is!" said Ann with deep conviction. "_Entirely_ too much so. I feel creepy. And Nathalie says you did some picturesque dance for her and your aunt--"
"The 'Dance of the Wild Turkey,'" explained Diane, much amused at the recollection. "Aunt Agatha insisted that it was some iniquitous and cunningly disguised Seminole species of turkey trot. She was horribly shocked and grew white as a ghost at my daring--"
"Fiddlesticks!" said Ann Sherrill. "She ought to have _all_ the shock out of her by now after bringing up you and Carl! _I'm_ going to ride out to the flat-woods with you, for I'm simply _dying_ for a new sensation. Dick's as stupid as an owl. He does nothing but hang around the Beach Club. And Philip Poynter's tennis mad. He looks hurt if you ask him to do anything else except perhaps to trail fatuously after you. It's the flat-woods for mine."
Ann returned from her visit to the Indian camp scintillant with italics and enthusiasm.
"My dear," she said, "I'm _wild_ about her--_quite_ wild! . . . I'm going again and _again_! . . . If I knew _half_ as much and were _half_ as lovely-- Why, do you know, Diane, she set me right about some ridiculous quotation, and I never try to get them straight, for _half_ the time I find my own way so _much_ more expressive. . . . There's Philip Poynter with a tennis racquet again! Diane, I'm losing patience with him."
From her madcap craving for new sensation, Ann was destined to evolve an inspiration which with customary energy and Diane's interested connivance she swept through to fruition, unaware that Fate marched, leering, at her heels.
Curious things may happen when masked men hold revel under a moonlit sky.
Thus in a tropical garden of palm and fountain, of dark, shifting shadows and a thousand softly luminous Chinese lanterns swaying in a breeze of spice, a Bedouin talked to an ancient Greek.
"He is here?" asked the Bedouin with an accent slightly foreign.
"Yes," said the Greek. "He is here and immensely relieved, I take it, to be rid of the jurisdiction of the hay-camp."