“Harem.”

The room was even fuller than she had expected. Her entrance seemed to cause a great sensation. Her heart sank, there was singing in her ears; she encountered all those faces with a sense of drowning. Moving mechanically in a trance of apprehension, it was with surprise a minute later that she found herself ensconced in a deck-chair beside an open window, alive and quite uninjured, though her pulse beat high. She removed her mouth-veil then and looked about her. It seemed to be a gathering of the whole English colony, with the addition of some French and German ladies. The Consul, her aversion, was talking with some other men, who formed a standing group. He took no notice of her, rather pointedly. The women, thirty at the least, kept up a din of chatter.