Nikka and I pouched our shares of the loot we had brought in, Nikka appropriating to himself Watkins's Birmingham silver watch. The Gypsy girl never took her eyes off him as she absently refastened her tattered bodice.  
"We are ready," said Nikka.
 
Her face flowered in an instantaneous smile.
 
"It is well, Giorgi Bordu. Come with me."
 
She led us across the courtyard to the building which fronted it on the left and was extended by the brick addition I have spoken of to shut in partially the rear of the court which abutted on the Bosphorus. A man was leaning over in the doorway, strapping up a bundle, and Kara planted her bare foot in the middle of his back, sending him sprawling. He was up in a flash, with his knife out and his face distorted with anger; but when he saw who had kicked him, the anger turned to smiles. He swung the bundle on his shoulder and swaggered off. And Kara looked at Nikka, with the expectant manner of a child who has performed a trick and expects to be applauded for it.
 
I grinned. I couldn't help it. But Nikka only motioned impatiently to the doorway. She caught her lip in a pout, dug her toes in the dust and affected not to understand him; but Nikka took one stride, with arm extended, and she danced away, all smiles again. Apparently, she didn't mind as long as she made him look at her.
 
Inside the door was a big, stone-paved hall. There were traces of carvings on the capitals of the pillars and a spaciousness that spoke of ancient glories. The stairs that led to the upper story were railed with marble and grooved deep by the tread of countless feet. But the place reeked with the squalor of a tenement. Three old women were huddled in front of a fire that blazed on an enormous hearth, and strings of onions and garlic hung from hooks in the ceiling. All around were scattered dirty piles of blankets and personal belongings.
 
Kara skipped across to the fireplace, and tapped the oldest of the three women on the shoulder.
 
"Hi, Mother Kathene," she called loudly. "Here are two strangers Beran has taken into the tribe."
 
The three hags tottered to their feet, and peered at us with bleared eyes.
 
"Strangers?" whined Mother Kathene. "Why strangers in the tribe? Haven't we enough fine young men to stab and steal for the chief? Heh-heh! I don't like strangers."
 
"Strangers are bad luck," pronounced a second beldame, whose name was Zitzi.
 
"Bad luck," echoed the third, who was called Lilli. "And I suppose we'll have to cook and scrub for the rascals, too."
 
Kara pinched her with a viciousness that made the poor old thing squeal.
 
"Don't talk of scrubbing to me!" she sneered. "You wouldn't touch water to a foul pot, let alone a man's clothes. You'd drown if you were rained on. Bah, Mother Lilli, you are lucky to have a chief like Beran, who gives the old ones work to do and shelter and food for the end of their days, instead of driving them out to seek the bounty of the Roumis and Franks. And you are luckier still to have a great thief like Giorgi Bordu to cook for. He is the greatest thief in the world. Why, he even caught me when I would have stolen from him!"
 
"If he steals well, he won't be a fighter," mumbled Mother Kathene. "What about the other one?"
 
"He took my knife from me without drawing his own," flared Kara. "No other man in the tribe could do that. The other? Oh, he is a Frank."
 
"More bad luck," wailed old Zitzi. "Tzigane folk who live with Franks are always spoiled. They worship the Christian goddess or they grow clumsy or they lose their courage or they take the spotted sickness."
 
Kara clouted her on the head.
 
"Have done with it," she commanded imperiously. "Where are Giorgi and Jakka to lie?"
 
"Where they choose," returned Zitzi sourly.
 
Kara waved her hand about the chamber.
 
"Here or above, whichever you say," she announced to us. "These are the quarters of the young men."
 
"May we look above?" asked Nikka, anxious to seize this opportunity to explore.
 
Her answer was to dance up the stairs—she seldom walked or did anything slowly.
 
We followed her. There was a central corridor, and from it opened various rooms, some of them crammed with all manner of goods, valuable rugs, bric-a-brac, cloths, and frequently, the veriest junk.
 
"Beran stores plunder here, as you can see," she said. "The other rooms are empty. The young men prefer to sleep all together where they can watch one another."
 
Nikka realized that if we set up a different standard of conduct from that observed by our brother bachelors we would prejudice our position in this strange community.
 
"What is good enough for them is good enough for us," he decided. "But is there no more to see? I thought the building ran around by the water."
 
"There is no connection," she replied. "The building over the water is just a storehouse. We are a great tribe, and Beran has agents everywhere. Never a day goes by that plunder does not come in, and we store it until there is opportunity to dispose of it."
 
"He is a master thief," agreed Nikka. "So we had heard. But where do you live, maiden?"
 
Her face glowed rosily with satisfaction at this first evidence of his interest in herself.
 
"Across the court," she answered. "Come and you shall see."
 
We descended the stairs into the big hall on the ground-floor, where the three hags had crouched again before the fire, and crossed the courtyard to the building opposite on the right of the entrance. It was long and graceful in appearance, beautifully built of a hard white marble, which had been coated with dirt for centuries. The cornices were elaborately sculptured in a conventional design; the window openings were carved and set with a light mastery that disguised their bulk.
 
The door was supported by simple pillars of wonderful green stone that contrived to show its color through the accumulation of filth which tried to mask it. How such pillars could have escaped the antiquary I do not know. They were as handsome as anything in St. Sophia. But then, as we were to discover, the whole abode of Beran Tokalji constituted an amazing shrine of Byzantine art, perhaps the most remarkable non-ecclesiastical remnant in the city.
 
But of all this I thought little at the time. What interested me more than anything was that immediately above the door on a panel let into the wall was carved a representation of a bull, head lowered and in act to charge. I looked at Nikka, and his eyes met mine with a warning glance to say nothing. It was a good thing that my knowledge of Gypsy dialect was sketchy, for had I been able to, I believe I should have exclaimed over this first clue and attempted to probe our guide's knowledge of it.
 
Kara never gave the sculpture a glance; it meant nothing to her. She beckoned us inside the door. Here again was a spacious, pillared hall, triple-aisled like a small church, its battered pavement showing traces here and there of the gorgeous mosaics which once had floored it. Whatever decorations adorned its walls were obscured by the incrustations of centuries of misuse. The pillars were of different stones, many of them semi-precious, and occasionally glinting pink or red or green or yellow through their drab coats of dirt and soot. At one end was an apse-like space large enough to hold a dinner table or a throne, and on the curving wall I fancied I could discern faint traces of one of those mosaic portraits with which the Byzantine artists loved to adorn their buildings.
 
But this superb chamber was littered with the odds and ends of a people accustomed to dwell in tents. I suppose Tokalji's tribe, by all accounts we had, had been living here for some hundreds of years, yet they never adapted themselves to urban conditions. Generation after generation looked upon this wonderful fragment of one of the world's stateliest palaces as no more than the four walls and a roof required to keep out rain and cold. The windows were covered by wooden shutters. Cleaning was resorted to only when the atmosphe............