Chapter 1

THE MAN AT THE WHEEL A TYRANT AND A LADY

THE MAN AT THE WHEEL

Wyndham Bimbashi's career in Egypt had been a series of mistakes. In the first place he was opinionated, in the second place he never seemed to have any luck; and, worst of all, he had a little habit of doing grave things on his own lightsome responsibility. This last quality was natural to him, but he added to it a supreme contempt for the native mind and an unhealthy scorn of the native official. He had not that rare quality, constantly found among his fellow-countrymen, of working the native up through his own medium, as it were, through his own customs and predispositions, to the soundness of Western methods of government. Therefore, in due time he made some dangerous mistakes. By virtue of certain high-handed actions he was the cause of several riots in native villages, and he had himself been attacked at more than one village as he rode between the fields of sugar-cane. On these occasions he had behaved very well--certainly no one could possibly doubt his bravery; but that was a small offset to the fact that his want of tact and his overbearing manner had been the means of turning a certain tribe of Arabs loose upon the country, raiding and killing.

But he could not, or would not, see his own vain stupidity. The climax came in a foolish sortie against the Arab tribe he had offended. In that unauthorised melee, in covert disobedience to a general order not to attack, unless at advantage--for the Gippies under him were raw levies-- his troop was diminished by half; and, cut off from the Nile by a flank movement of the Arabs, he was obliged to retreat and take refuge in the well-fortified and walled house which had previously been a Coptic monastery.

Here, at last, the truth came home to Wyndham bimbashi. He realised that though in his six years' residence in the land he had acquired a command of Arabic equal to that of others who had been in the country twice that time, he had acquired little else. He awoke to the fact that in his cock-sure schemes for the civil and military life of Egypt there was not one element of sound sense; that he had been all along an egregious failure. It did not come home to him with clear, accurate conviction-- his brain was not a first-rate medium for illumination; but the facts struck him now with a blind sort of force; and he accepted the blank sensation of failure. Also, he read in the faces of those round him an alien spirit, a chasm of black misunderstanding which his knowledge of Arabic could never bridge over.

Here he was, shut up with Gippies who had no real faith in him, in the house of a Sheikh whose servants would cut his throat on no provocation at all; and not an eighth of a mile away was a horde of Arabs--a circle of death through which it was impossible to break with the men in his command. They must all die here, if they were not relieved.

The nearest garrison was at Kerbat, sixty miles away, where five hundred men were stationed. Now that his cup of mistakes was full, Wyndham bimbashi would willingly have made the attempt to carry word to the garrison there. But he had no right to leave his post. He called for a volunteer. No man responded. Panic was upon the Gippies. Though Wyndham's heart sickened within him, his lips did not frame a word of reproach; but a blush of shame came into his face, and crept up to his eyes, dimming them. For there flashed through his mind what men at home would think of him when this thing, such an end to his whole career, was known. As he stood still, upright and confounded, some one touched his arm.

It was Hassan, his Soudanese servant. Hassan was the one person in Egypt who thoroughly believed in him. Wyndham was as a god to Hassan, though this same god had given him a taste of a belt more than once. Hassan had not resented the belt, though once, in a moment of affectionate confidence, he had said to Wyndham that when his master got old and died he would be the servant of an American or a missionary, "which no whack Mahommed."

It was Hassan who now volunteered to carry word to the garrison at Kerbat.

"If I no carry, you whack me with belt, Saadat," said Hassan, whose logic and reason were like his master's, neither better nor worse.

"If you do, you shall have fifty pounds--and the missionary," answered Wyndham, his eyes still cloudy and his voice thick; for it touched him in a tender nerve that this one Soudanese boy should believe in him and do for him what he would give much to do for the men under him. For his own life he did not care--his confusion and shame were so great.

He watched Hassan steal out into the white brilliance of the night.

"Mind you keep a whole skin, Hassan," he said, as the slim lad with the white teeth, oily hair, and legs like ivory, stole along the wall, to drop presently on his belly and make for some palm-trees a hundred yards away.

The minutes went by in silence; an hour went by; the whole night went by; Hassan had got beyond the circle of trenchant steel.

They must now abide Hassan's fate; but another peril was upon them. There was not a goolah of water within the walls!

It was the time of low Nile when all the land is baked like a crust of bread, when the creaking of the shadoofs and the singing croak of the sakkia are heard the night long like untiring crickets with throats of frogs. It was the time succeeding the khamsin, when the skin dries like slaked lime and the face is for ever powdered with dust; and the fellaheen, in the slavery of superstition, strain their eyes day and night for the Sacred Drop, which tells that the flood is flowing fast from the hills of Abyssinia.

It was like the Egyptian that nothing should be said to Wyndham about the dearth of water until it was all gone. The house of the Sheikh, and its garden, where were a pool and a fountain, were supplied from the great Persian wheel at the waterside. On this particular sakkia had been wont to sit all day a patient fellah, driving the blindfolded buffaloes in their turn. It was like the patient fellah, when the Arabs, in pursuit of Wyndham and his Gippies, suddenly cut in between him and the house, to deliver himself over to the conqueror, with his hand upon his head in sign of obedience.

It was also like the gentle Egyptian that he eagerly showed the besiegers how the water could be cut off from the house by dropping one of the sluice-gates; while, opening another, all the land around the Arab encampments might be well watered, the pools well filled, and the grass kept green for horses and camels. This was the reason that Wyndham bimbashi and his Gippies, and the Sheikh and his household, faced the fact, the morning after Hassan left, that there was scarce a goolah of water for a hundred burning throats. Wyndham understood now why the Arabs sat down and waited, that torture might be added to the oncoming death of the Englishman, his natives, and the "friendlies."

All that day terror and ghastly hate hung like a miasma over the besieged house and garden. Fifty eyes hungered for the blood of Wyndham bimbashi; not because he was Wyndham bimbashi, but because the heathen in these men cried out for sacrifice; and what so agreeable a sacrifice as the Englishman who had led them into this disaster and would die so well --had they ever seen an Englishman who did not die well?

Wyndham was quiet and watchful, and he cudgelled his bullet-head, and looked down his long nose in meditation all the day, while his tongue became dry and thick, and his throat seemed to crack like roasting leather. At length he worked the problem out. Then he took action.

He summoned his troop before him, and said briefly: "Men, we must have water. The question is, who is going to steal out to the sakkia to- night, to shut the one sluice and open the other?"

No one replied. No one understood quite what Wyndham meant. Shutting one sluice and opening the other did not seem to meet the situation. There was the danger of getting to the sakkia, but there was also an after. Would it be possible to shut one sluice and open the other without the man at the wheel knowing? Suppose you killed the man at the wheel--what then?

The Gippies and the friendlies scowled, but did not speak. The bimbashi was responsible for all; he was an Englishman, let him get water for them, or die like the rest of them--perhaps before them!

Wyndham could not travel the sinuosities of their minds, and it would not have affected his purpose if he could have done so. When no man replied, he simply said:

"All right, men. You shall have water before morning. Try and hold out till then." He dismissed them. For a long time he walked up and down the garden of straggling limes, apparently listless, and smoking hard. He reckoned carefully how long it would take Hassan to get to Kerbat, and for relief to come. He was fond of his pipe, and he smoked now as if it were the thing he most enjoyed in the world. He held the bowl in the hollow of his hand almost tenderly. He seemed unconscious of the scowling looks around him. At last he sat down on the ledge of the rude fountain, with his face towards the Gippies and the Arabs squatted on the ground, some playing mankalah, others sucking dry lime leaves, many smoking apathetically.

One man with the flicker of insanity in his eyes suddenly ran forward and threw himself on the ground before Wyndham.

"In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful--water!" he cried. "Water--I am dying, effendi whom God preserve!"

"Nile water is sweet; you shall drink it before morning, Mahommed," answered Wyndham quietly. "God will preserve your life till the Nile water cools your throat."

"Before dawn, O effendi?" gasped the Arab. "Before dawn, by the mercy of God," answered Wyndham; and for the first time in his life he had a burst of imagination. The Orient had touched him at last.

"Is not the song of the sakkia in thine ear, Mahommed?" he said

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left. The Nile floweth by night and the balasses are filled at dawn-- The maid of the village shall bear to thy bed the dewy grey goolah at dawn Turn, O Sakkia!"

Wyndham was learning at last the way to the native mind.

The man rose from his knees. A vision of his home in the mirkaz of Minieh passed before him. He stretched out his hands, and sang in the vibrating monotone of his people:

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left: Who will take care of me, if my father dies? Who will give me water to drink, and the cucumber vine at my door-- Turn, O Sakkia!"

Then he crept back again to the wall of the house, where he huddled between a Berberine playing a darabukkeh and a man of the Fayoum who chanted the fatihah from the Koran.

Wyndham looked at them all and pondered. "If the devils out there would only attack us," he said between his teeth, "or if we could only attack them!" he added, and he nervously hastened his footsteps; for to him this inaction was terrible. "They'd forget their thirst if they were fighting," he muttered, and then he frowned; for the painful neighing of the horses behind the house came to his ear. In desperation he went inside and climbed to the roof, where he could see the circle of the enemy.

It was no use. They were five to one, and his Gippies were demoralised. It would be a fine bit of pluck to try and cut his way through the Arabs to the Nile--but how many would reach it?

No, he had made his full measure of mistakes, he would not add to the list. If Hassan got through to Kerbat his Gippies here would no doubt be relieved, and there would be no more blood on his head. Relieved? And when they were relieved, what of himself, Wyndham bimbashi? He knew what men would say in Cairo, what men would say at the War Office in London town, at "The Rag"--everywhere! He could not look his future in the face. He felt that every man in Egypt, save himself, had known all along that he was a complete failure.

It did not matter while he himself was not conscious of it; but now that the armour-plate of conceit protecting his honest mind had been torn away on the reefs of foolish deeds, it mattered everything. For when his conceit was peeled away, there was left a crimson cuticle of the Wyndham pride. Certainly he could not attack the Arabs--he had had his eternal fill of sorties.

Also he could not wait for the relief party, for his Gippies and the friendlies were famishing, dying of thirst. He prayed for night. How slowly the minutes, the hours passed; and how bright was the moon when it rose! brighter even than it was when Hassan crept out to steal through the Arab lines.

.....................

At midnight, Wyndham stole softly out of a gate in the garden wall, and, like Hassan, dropping to the ground, crept towards a patch of maize lying between the house and the river. He was dressed like a fellah, with the long blue yelek, and a poor wool fez, and round the fez was a white cloth, as it were to protect his mouth from the night air, after the manner of the peasant.

The fires of the enemy were dying down, and only here and there Arabs gossiped or drank coffee by the embers. At last Wyndham was able to drop into the narrow channel, now dry, through which, when the sluice was open and the sakkia turned, the water flowed to the house. All went well till he was within a hundred yards of the wheel, though now and again he could hear sentries snoring or talking just above him. Suddenly he heard breathing an arm's length before him, then a figure raised itself and a head turned towards him. The Arab had been asleep, but his hand ran to his knife by instinct--too late, for Wyndham's fingers were at his throat, and he had neither time nor chance to cry Allah! before the breath left him.

Wyndham crept on. The sound of the sakkia was in his ears--the long, creaking, crying song, filling the night. And now there arose the Song of the Sakkia from the man at the wheel:

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left; The heron feeds by the water side--shall I starve in my onion-field! Shall the Lord of the World withhold his tears that water the land-- Turn, O Sakkia!"

. . . The hard white stars, the cold blue sky, the far-off Libyan hills in a gold and opal glow, the smell of the desert, the deep swish of the Nile, the Song of the Sakkia. . . .

Wyndham's heart beat faster, his blood flowed quicker, he strangled a sigh in his breast. Here, with death on every hand, with immediate and fearful peril before him, out of the smell of the desert and the ghostly glow of the Libyan hills there came a memory--the memory of a mistake he had made years before with a woman. She had never forgiven him for the mistake--he knew it at last. He knew that no woman could ever forgive the blunder he had made--not a blunder of love but a blunder of self-will and an unmanly, unmannerly conceit. It had nearly wrecked her life: and he only realised it now, in the moment of clear-seeing which comes to every being once in a lifetime. Well, it was something to have seen the mistake at last.

He had come to the sluice-gate. It was impossible to open it without the fellah on the water-wheel seeing him.

There was another way. He crept close and closer to the wheel. The breath of the blindfolded buffalo was in his face, he drew himself up lightly and quickly beside the buffalo--he was making no blunder now.

Suddenly he leapt from behind the buffalo upon the fellah and smothered his mouth in the white cloth he had brought. There was a moment's struggle, then, as the wheel went slower and slower, and the patient buffalo stopped, Wyndham dropped the gagged, but living, fellah into a trench by the sakkia and, calling to the buffalo, slid over swiftly, opened the sluice-gate of the channel which fed the house, and closed that leading to the Arab encampment.

Then he sat down where the fellah had sat, and the sakkia droned its mystic music over the river, the desert, and the plain. But the buffalo moved slowly-the fellah's song had been a spur to its travel, as the camel-driver's song is to the caravan in the waste of sands. Wyndham hesitated an instant, then, as the first trickle of water entered the garden of the house where his Gippies and the friendlies were, his voice rose in the Song of the Sakkia:

"Turn, O Sakkia, turn to the right, and turn to the left: Who will take care of me, if my father dies? Who will give me water to drink, and the cucumber vine at my door Turn, O Sakkia!"

If he had but one hour longer there would be enough water for men and horses for days, twenty jars of water pouring all the time!

Now and again a figure came towards the wheel, but not close enough to see that the one sluice-gate had been shut and the other opened. A half- hour passed, an hour, and then the end came.

The gagged fellah had managed to free his mouth, and though his feet were bound also and he could not loose them, he gave a loud call for help. From dying fires here and there Arab sentries sprang to their feet with rifles and lances.

Wyndham's work was done. He leapt from the sakkia, and ran towards the house. Shot after shot was fired at him, lances were thrown, and once an Arab barred his way suddenly. He pistoled him and ran on. A lance caught him in the left arm. He tore it out and pushed forward. Stooping once, he caught up a sword from the ground. When he was within fifty yards of the house, four Arabs intercepted him. He slashed through, then turned with his pistol and fired as he ran quickly towards the now open gate. He was within ten yards of it, and had fired his last shot, when a bullet crashed through his jaw.

A dozen Gippies ran out, dragged him in, and closed the gate.

The last thing Wyndham did before he died in the grey of dawn--and this is told of him by the Gippies themselves-was to cough up the bullet from his throat, and spit it out upon the ground. The Gippies thought it a miraculous feat, and that he had done it in scorn of the Arab foe.

Before another sunrise and sunset had come, Wyndham bimbashi's men were relieved by the garrison of Kerbat, after a hard fight.

There are Englishmen in Egypt who still speak slightingly of Wyndham bimbashi, but the British officer who buried him hushed a gossiping dinner-party a few months ago in Cairo by saying:

"Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that's gone, And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him; But little he'll reek, if they let him sleep on In the grave where his Gippies have laid him."

And he did not apologise for paraphrasing the famous ballad. He has shamed Egypt at last into admiration for Wyndham bimbashi: to the deep satisfaction of Hassan, the Soudanese boy, who received his fifty pounds, and to this day wears the belt which once kept him in the narrow path of duty.

A TYRANT AND A LADY

When Donovan Pasha discovered the facts for the first time, he found more difficulty in keeping the thing to himself than he had ever found with any other matter in Egypt. He had unearthed one of those paradoxes which make for laughter--and for tears. It gave him both; he laughed till he cried. Then he went to the Khedivial Club and ordered himself four courses, a pint of champagne and a glass of '48 port, his usual dinner being one course, double portion, and a pint of claret. As he sat eating he kept reading a letter over and over, and each time he read he grinned --he did not smile like a well-behaved man of the world, he did not giggle like a well-veneered Egyptian back from Paris, he chuckled like a cabman responding to a liberal fare and a good joke. A more unconventional little man never lived. Simplicity was his very life, and yet he had a gift for following the sinuosities of the Oriental mind; he had a quality almost clairvoyant, which came, perhaps, from his Irish forebears. The cross-strain of English blood had done him good too; it made him punctilious and kept his impulses within secure bounds. It also made him very polite when he was angry, and very angry when any one tried to impose upon him, or flatter him.

The letter he read so often was from Kingsley Bey, the Englishman, who, coming to Egypt penniless, and leaving estates behind him encumbered beyond release, as it would seem, had made a fortune and a name in a curious way. For years he had done no good for himself, trying his hand at many things--sugar, salt, cotton, cattle, but always just failing to succeed, though he came out of his enterprises owing no one. Yet he had held to his belief that he would make a fortune, and he allowed his estates to become still more encumbered, against the advice of his solicitors, who grew more irritable as interest increased and rents further declined. The only European in Egypt who shared his own belief in himself was Dicky Donovan. Something in the unfailing good-humour, the buoyant energy, the wide imagination of the man seized Dicky, warranted the conviction that he would yet make a success. There were reasons why sugar, salt, cotton, cattle and other things had not done well. Taxes, the corvee, undue influence in favour of pashas who could put his water on their land without compensation, or unearthed old unpaid mortgages on his land, or absorbed his special salt concession in the Government monopoly, or suddenly put a tax on all horses and cattle not of native breed; all these and various other imposts, exactions, or interferences engineered by the wily Mamour, the agent of the mouffetish, or the intriguing Pasha, killed his efforts, in spite of labours unbelievable. The venture before the last had been sugar, and when he arrived in Cairo, having seen his fields and factories absorbed in the Khedive's domains, he had but one ten pounds to his name.

He went to Dicky Donovan and asked the loan of a thousand pounds. It took Dicky's breath away. His own banking account seldom saw a thousand --deposit. Dicky told Kingsley he hadn't got it. Kingsley asked him to get it--he had credit, could borrow it from the bank, from the Khedive himself! The proposal was audacious--Kingsley could offer no security worth having. His enthusiasm and courage were so infectious, however, though his ventures had been so fruitless, that Dicky laughed in his face. Kingsley's manner then suddenly changed, and he assured Dicky that he would receive five thousand pounds for the thousand within a year. Now, Dicky knew that Kingsley never made a promise to any one that he did not fulfil. He gave Kingsley the thousand pounds. He did more. He went to the Khedive with Kingsley's whole case. He spoke as he had seldom spoken, and he secured a bond from Ismail, which might not be broken. He also secured three thousand pounds of the Khedive's borrowings from Europe, on Kingsley's promise that it should be returned five-fold.

That was how Kingsley got started in the world again, how he went mining in the desert afar, where pashas and mamours could not worry him. The secret of his success was purely Oriental. He became a slave-owner. He built up a city of the desert round him. He was its ruler. Slavery gave him steady untaxed labour. A rifle-magazine gave him security against marauding tribes, his caravans were never over powered; his blacks were his own. He had a way with them; they thought him the greatest man in the world. Now, at last, he was rich enough. His mines were worked out, too, and the market was not so good; he had supplied it too well. Dicky's thousand had brought him five thousand, and Ismail's three thousand had become fifteen thousand, and another twenty thousand besides. For once the Khedive had found a kind of taxation, of which he got the whole proceeds, not divided among many as heretofore. He got it all. He made Kingsley a Bey, and gave him immunity from all other imposts or taxation. Nothing but an Egyptian army could have removed him from his desert-city.

Now, he was coming back--to-night at ten o'clock he would appear at the Khedivial Club, the first time in seven years. But this was not all. He was coming back to be married as soon as might be.

This was the thing which convulsed Dicky.

Upon the Nile at Assiout lived a young English lady whose life was devoted to agitation against slavery in Egypt. Perhaps the Civil War in America, not so many years before, had fired her spirit; perhaps it was pious enthusiasm; perhaps it was some altruistic sentiment in her which must find expression; perhaps, as people said, she had had a love affair in England which had turned out badly. At any rate she had come over to Egypt with an elderly companion, and, after a short stay at the Consulate, had begun the career of the evangel. She had now and then created international difficulty, and Ismail, tolerant enough, had been tempted to compel her to leave the country, but, with a zeal which took on an aspect of self-opinionated audacity, she had kept on. Perhaps her beauty helped her on her course--perhaps the fact that her superb egotism kept her from being timorous, made her career possible. In any case, there she was at Assiout, and there she had been for years, and no accident had come to her; and, during the three months she was at Cairo every year, pleading against slavery and the corvee, she increased steadily the respect in which she was held; but she was considered mad as Gordon. So delighted had Ismail been by a quiet, personal attack she made upon him, that without malice, and with an obtuse and impulsive kindness, he sent her the next morning a young Circassian slave, as a mark of his esteem, begging her through the swelling rhetoric of his messenger to keep the girl, and more than hinting at her value. It stupefied her, and the laughter of Cairo added to her momentary embarrassment; but she kept the girl, and prepared to send her back to her people.

The girl said she had no people, and would not go; she would stay with "My Lady"--she would stay for ever with "My Lady." It was confusing, but the girl stayed, worshipping the ground "My Lady" walked on. In vain My Lady educated her. Out of hearing, she proudly told whoever would listen that she was "My Lady's slave." It was an Egyptian paradox; it was in line with everything else in the country, part of the moral opera boufe.

In due course, the lady came to hear of the English slave-owner, who ruled the desert-city and was making a great fortune out of the labours of his slaves. The desert Arabs who came down the long caravan road, white with bleached bones, to Assiout, told her he had a thousand slaves. Against this Englishman her anger, was great. She unceasingly condemned him, and whenever she met Dicky Donovan she delivered her attack with delicate violence. Did Dicky know him? Why did not he, in favour with Ismail, and with great influence, stop this dreadful and humiliating business? It was a disgrace to the English name. How could we preach freedom and a higher civilisation to the Egyptians while an Englishman enriched himself and ruled a province by slavery? Dicky's invariable reply was that we couldn't, and that things weren't moving very much towards a higher civilisation in Egypt. But he asked her if she ever heard of a slave running away from Kingsley Bey, or had she ever heard of a case of cruelty on his part? Her reply was that he had given slaves the kourbash, and had even shot them. Dicky thereupon suggested that Kingsley Bey was a government, and that the kourbash was not yet abolished in the English navy, for instance; also that men had to be shot sometimes.

At last she had made a direct appeal to Kingsley Bey. She sent an embassy to him--Dicky prevented her from going herself; he said he would have her deported straightway, if she attempted it. She was not in such deadly earnest that she did not know he would keep his word, and that the Consulate could not help her would have no time to do so. So, she confined herself to an elaborate letter, written in admirable English and inspired by most noble sentiments. The beauty that was in her face was in her letter in even a greater degree. It was very adroit, too, very ably argued, and the moral appeal was delicate and touching, put with an eloquence at once direct and arresting. The invocation with which the letter ended was, as Kingsley Bey afterwards put it, "a pitch of poetry and humanity never reached except by a Wagner opera."

Kingsley Bey's response to the appeal was a letter to the lady, brought by a sarraf, a mamour and six slaves, beautifully mounted and armed, saying that he had been deeply moved by her appeal, and as a proof of the effect of her letter, she might free the six slaves of his embassy. This she straightway did joyfully, and when they said they wished to go to Cairo, she saw them and their horses off on the boat with gladness, and she shook them each by the hand and prayed Heaven in their language to give them long plumes of life and happiness. Arrived at Cairo these freemen of Assiout did as they had been ordered by Kingsley--found Donovan Pasha, delivered a certain letter to him, and then proceeded, also as they had been ordered, to a certain place in the city, even to Ismail's stables, to await their master's coming.

This letter was now in Dicky's hand, and his mirth was caused by the statement that Kingsley Bey had declared that he was coming to marry My Lady--she really was "My Lady," the Lady May Harley; that he was coming by a different route from "his niggers," and would be there the same day. Dicky would find him at ten o'clock at the Khedivial Club.

My Lady hated slavery--and unconsciously she kept a slave; she regarded Kingsley Bey as an enemy to civilisation and to Egypt, she detested him as strongly as an idealistic nature could and should--and he had set out to marry her, the woman who had bitterly arraigned him at the bar of her judgment. All this play was in Dicky's hands for himself to enjoy, in a perfect dress rehearsal ere ever one of the Cairene public or the English world could pay for admission and take their seats. Dicky had in more senses than one got his money's worth out of Kingsley Bey. He wished he might let the Khedive into the secret at once, for he had an opinion of Ismail's sense of humour; had he not said that very day in the presence of the French Consul, "Shut the window, quick! If the consul sneezes, France will demand compensation!" But Dicky was satisfied that things should be as they were. He looked at the clock--it was five minutes to ten. He rose from the table, and went to the smoking-room. In vain it was sought to draw him into the friendly circles of gossiping idlers and officials. He took a chair at the very end of the room and opposite the door, and waited, watching.

Precisely at ten the door opened and a tall, thin, loose-knit figure entered. He glanced quickly round, saw Dicky, and swung down the room, nodding to men who sprang to their feet to greet him. Some of the Egyptians looked darkly at him, but he smiled all round, caught at one or two hands thrust out to him, said: "Business--business first!" in a deep bass voice, and, hastening on, seized both of Dicky's hands in his, then his shoulders, and almost roared: "Well, what do you think of it? Isn't it all right? Am I, or am I not, Dicky Pasha?"

"You very much are," answered Dicky, thrust a cigar at him, and set him down in the deepest chair he could find. He sprawled wide, and lighted his cigar, then lay back and looked down his long nose at his friend.

"I mean it, too," he said after a minute, and reached for a glass of water the waiter brought. "No, thanks, no whiskey--never touch it--good example to the slaves!" He laughed long and low, and looked at Dicky out of the corner of his eye. "Good-looking lot I sent you, eh?"

"Oosters, every one of 'em. Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. I learnt their grin, it suits my style of beauty." Dicky fitted the action to the word. "You'll start with me in the morning to Assiout?"

"I can start, but life and time are short."

"You think I can't and won't marry her?"

"This isn't the day of Lochinvar."

"This is the day of Kingsley Bey, Dicky Pasha."

Dicky frowned. He had a rare and fine sense where women were concerned, were they absent or present. "How very artless--and in so short a time, too!" he said tartly.

Kingsley laughed quietly. "Art is long, but tempers are short!" he retorted.

Dicky liked a Roland for his Oliver. "It's good to see you back again," he said, changing the subject.

"How long do you mean to stay?"

"Here?" Dicky nodded. "Till I'm married."

Dicky became very quiet, a little formal, and his voice took on a curious smoothness, through which sharp suggestion pierced.

"So long?--Enter our Kingsley Bey into the underground Levantine world."

This was biting enough. To be swallowed up by Cairo life and all that it involves, was no fate to suggest to an Englishman, whose opinion of the Levantine needs no defining. "Try again, Dicky," said Kingsley, refusing to be drawn. "This is not one huge joke, or one vast impertinence, so far as the lady is concerned. I've come back-b-a-c-k" (he spelled the word out), "with all that it involves. I've come back, Dicky."

He quieted all at once, and leaned over towards his friend. "You know the fight I've had. You know the life I've lived in Egypt. You know what I left behind me in England--nearly all. You've seen the white man work. You've seen the black ooster save him. You've seen the ten-times- a-failure pull out. Have I played the game? Have I acted squarely? Have I given kindness for kindness, blow for blow? Have I treated my slaves like human beings? Have I--have I won my way back to life--life?" He spread out a hand with a little grasping motion. "Have I saved the old stand off there in Cumberland by the sea, where you can see the snow on Skaw Fell? Have I? Do you wonder that I laugh? Ye gods and little fishes! I've had to wear a long face years enough--seven hard years, seven fearful years, when I might be murdered by a slave, and I and my slaves might be murdered by some stray brigade, under some general of Ismail's, working without orders, without orders, of course--oh, very much of course! Why shouldn't I play the boy to-day, little Dicky Donovan? I am a Mahommedan come Christian again. I am a navvy again come gentleman. I am an Arab come Englishman once more.

"I am an outcast come home. I am a dead man come to life."

Dicky leaned over and laid a hand on his knee. "You are a credit to Cumberland," he said. "No other man could have done it. I won't ask any more questions. Anything you want of me, I am with you, to do, or say, or be."

"Good. I want you to go to Assiout to-morrow."

"Will you see Ismail first? It might be safer--good policy."

"I will see My Lady first. . . . Trust me. I know what I'm doing. You will laugh as I do." Laughter broke from his lips. It was as though his heart was ten years old. Dicky's eyes moistened. He had never seen anything like it--such happiness, such boyish confidence. And what had not this man experienced! How had he drunk misfortune to the dregs! What unbelievable optimism had been his! How had he been at once hard and kind, tyrannical and human, defiant and peaceful, daring yet submissive, fierce yet just! And now, here, with so much done, with a great fortune and great power, a very boy, he was planning to win the heart of, and marry, his avowed foe, the woman who had condemned him without stint.

II

On her wide veranda, a stone's-throw from the banks of the Nile, My Lady sat pen in hand and paper-pad upon her knee. She had written steadily for an hour, and now she raised her head to look out on the swift- flowing, muddy water, where broad khiassas floated down the stream, laden with bersim; where feluccas covered the river, bearing natives and donkeys; where faithful Moslems performed their ablutions, and other faithful Moslems, their sandals laid aside, said their prayers with their faces towards Mecca, oblivious of all around; where blue-robed women filled their goolahs with water, and bore them away, steady and stately; where a gang of conscripts, chained ankle to ankle, followed by a crowd of weeping and wailing women, were being driven to the anchorage of the stern-wheeled transport-steamer. All these sights she had seen how many hundred times! To her it was all slavery. The laden khiassas represented the fruits of enforced labour; the ablutions and prayers were but signs of submission to the tyranny of a religion designed for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, a creed and code of gross selfishness--were not women only admitted to Heaven by the intercession of their husbands and after unceasing prayer? Whether beasts of burden, the girl with the goolah, women in the harem, or servants of pleasure, they were all in the bonds of slavery, and the land was in moral darkness. So it seemed to her.

How many times had she written these things in different forms and to different people--so often, too often, to the British Consul at Cairo, whose patience waned. At first, the seizure of conscripts, with all that it involved, had excited her greatly. It had required all her common- sense to prevent her, then and there, protesting, pleading, with the kavass, who did the duty of Ismail's Sirdar. She had confined herself, however, to asking for permission to give the men cigarettes and slippers, dates and bread, and bags of lentils for soup. Even this was not unaccompanied by danger, for the Mahommedan mind could not at first tolerate the idea of a lady going unveiled; only fellah women, domestic cattle, bared their faces to the world. The conscripts, too, going to their death--for how few of them ever returned?--leaving behind all hope, all freedom, passing to starvation and cruelty, at last to be cut down by the Arab, or left dying of illness in the desert, they took her gifts with sullen faces. Her beautiful freedom was in such contrast to their torture, slavery of a direful kind. But as again and again the kavasses came and opened midnight doors and snatched away the young men, her influence had grown so fast that her presence brought comfort, and she helped to assuage the grief of the wailing women. She even urged upon them that philosophy of their own, which said "Malaish" to all things-- the "It is no matter," of the fated Hamlet. In time she began to be grateful that an apathetic resignation, akin to the quiet of despair, was the possession of their race. She was far from aware that something in their life, of their philosophy, was affecting her understanding. She had a strong brain and a stronger will, but she had a capacity for feeling greater still, and this gave her imagination, temperament, and-- though it would have shocked her to know it--a certain credulity, easily transmutable into superstition. Yet, as her sympathies were, to some extent, rationalised by stern fact and everlasting custom, her opposition to some things became more active and more fervid.

Looking into the distance, she saw two or three hundred men at work on a canal, draining the property of Selamlik Pasha, whose tyrannies, robberies, and intrigues were familiar to all Egypt, whose palaces were almost as many as those of the notorious Mouffetish. These men she saw now working in the dread corvee had been forced from their homes by a counterfeit Khedivial order. They had been compelled to bring their own tools, and to feed and clothe and house themselves, without pay or reward, having left behind them their own fields untilled, their own dourha unreaped, their date-palms, which the tax-gatherer confiscated. Many and many a time--unless she was prevented, and this at first had been often--she had sent food and blankets to these poor creatures who, their day's work done, prayed to God as became good Mahommedans, and, without covering, stretched themselves out on the bare ground to sleep.

It suggested that other slavery, which did not hide itself under the forms of conscription and corvee. It was on this slavery her mind had been concentrated, and against it she had turned her energies and her life. As she now sat, pen in hand, the thought of how little she had done, how futile had been all her crusade, came to her. Yet there was, too, a look of triumph in her eyes. Until three days ago she had seen little result from her labours. Then had come a promise of better things. From the Englishman, against whom she had inveighed, had been sent an olive branch, a token--of conversion? Had he not sent six slaves for her to free, and had she not freed them? That was a step. She pictured to herself this harsh expatriated adventurer, this desert ruler, this slave-holder--had he been a slave-dealer she could herself have gladly been his executioner--surrounded by his black serfs, receiving her letter. In her mind's eye she saw his face flush as he read her burning phrases, then turn a little pale, then grow stern.

She saw him, after a sleepless night, haunted by her warnings, her appeal to his English manhood. She saw him rise, meditative and relenting, and send forthwith these slaves for her to free. Her eye glistened again, as it had shone while she had written of this thing to the British Consul at Cairo, to her father in England, who approved of her sympathies and lamented her actions. Had her crusade been altogether fruitless, she asked herself. Ismail's freed Circassian was in her household, being educated like an English girl, lifted out of her former degradation, made to understand "a higher life"; and yesterday she had sent away six liberated slaves, with a gold-piece each, as a gift from a free woman to free men. It seemed to her for a moment now, as she sat musing and looking, that her thirty years of life had not been--rather, might not be-in vain.

There was one other letter she would write--to Donovan Pasha, who had not been ardent in her cause, yet who might have done so much through his influence with Ismail, who, it was said, liked him better than any Englishman he had known, save Gordon. True, Donovan Pasha had steadily worked for the reduction of the corvee, and had, in the name of the Khedive, steadily reduced private corvee, but he had never set his face against slavery, save to see that no slave-dealing was permitted below Assouan. Yet, with her own eyes she had seen Abyssinian slaves sold in the market-place of Assiout. True, when she appealed to him, Donovan Pasha had seen to it that the slave-dealers were severely punished, but the fact remained that he was unsympathetic on the large issue. When appealed to, the British Consul had petulantly told her that Donovan Pasha was doing more important work. Yet she could only think of England as the engine of civilisation, as an evangelising power, as the John the Baptist of the nations--a country with a mission. For so beautiful a woman, of so worldly a stock, of a society so in the front of things, she had some Philistine notions, some quite middle-class ideals. It was like a duchess taking to Exeter Hall; but few duchesses so afflicted had been so beautiful and so young, so much of the worldly world--her father was high in the household of an illustrious person. . . . If she could but make any headway against slavery--she had as disciples ten Armenian pashas, several wealthy Copts, a number of Arab sheikhs, and three Egyptian princes, sympathetic rather than active--perhaps, through her father, she might be able to move the illustrious person, and so, in time, the Government of England.

It was a delightful dream--the best she had imagined for many a day. She was roused from it by the scream of a whistle, and the hoonch-hoonch of a sternwheel steamer. A Government boat was hastening in to the bank, almost opposite her house. She picked up the field-glass from the window-sill behind her, and swept the deck of the steamer. There were two figures in English dress, though one wore the tarboosh. The figure shorter and smaller than the other she recognised. This was Donovan Pasha. She need not write her letter to him, then. He would be sure to visit her. Disapprove of him as she did from one stand-point, he always excited in her feelings of homesickness, of an old life, full of interests--music, drama, art, politics, diplomacy, the court, the hunting-field, the quiet house-party. He troubled her in a way too, for his sane certainty, set against her aspiring credulity, arrested, even commanded, her sometimes.

Instinctively she put out her hand to gather in flying threads of hair, she felt at the pearl fastening of her collar, she looked at her brown shoes and her dress, and was satisfied. She was spotless. And never had her face shone--really shone--to such advantage. It had not now the brilliant colours of the first years. The climate, her work in hospital building, her labours against slavery, had touched her with a little whiteness. She was none the less good to see.

Who was this striding along with Donovan Pasha, straight towards her house? No one she had ever seen in Egypt, and yet in manner like some one she had seen before--a long time before. Her mind flashed back through the years to the time when she was a girl, and visited old friends of her father in a castle looking towards Skaw Fell, above the long valley of the Nidd. A kind of mist came before her eyes now.

When she really saw again, they were at the steps of the veranda, and Donovan Pasha's voice was greeting her. Then, as, without a word but with a welcoming smile, she shook hands with Dicky, her look was held, first by a blank arrest of memory, then by surprise.

Dicky turned for his office of introduction but was stayed by the look of amusement in his friend's face, and by the amazed recognition in that of My Lady. He stepped back with an exclamation, partly of chagrin. He saw that this recognition was no coincidence, so far as the man was concerned, though the woman had been surprised in a double sense. He resented the fact that Kingsley Bey had kept this from him--he had the weakness of small-statured men and of diplomatic people who have reputations for knowing and doing. The man, all smiling, held out his hand, and his look was quizzically humorous as he said:

"You scarcely looked to see me here, Lady May?" Her voice trembled with pleasure. "No, of course. When did you come, Lord Selden? . . . Won't you sit down?"

That high green terrace of Cumberland, the mist on Skaw Fell, the sun out over the sea, they were in her eyes. So much water had gone under the bridges since!

"I was such a young girl then--in short frocks--it was a long time ago, I fear," she added, as if in continuation of the thought flashing through her mind. "Let me see," she went on fearlessly; "I am thirty; that was thirteen years ago."

"I am thirty-seven, and still it is thirteen years ago."

"You look older, when you don't smile," she added, and glanced at his grey hair.

He laughed now. She was far, far franker than she was those many years ago, and it was very agreeable and refreshing. "Donovan, there, reproved me last night for frivolity," he said.

"If Donovan Pasha has become grave, then there is hope for Egypt," she said, turning to Dicky with a new brightness.

"When there's hope for Egypt, I'll have lost my situation, and there'll be reason for drawing a long face," said Dicky, and got the two at such an angle that he could watch them to advantage. "I thrive while it's opera boufe. Give us the legitimate drama, and I go with Ismail."

The lady shrank a little. "If it weren't you, Donovan Pasha, I should say that, associated with Ismail, as you are, you are as criminal as he."

"What is crime in one country, is virtue in another," answered Dicky. "I clamp the wheel sometimes to keep it from spinning too fast. That's my only duty. I am neither Don Quixote nor Alexander Imperator."

She thought he was referring obliquely to the corvee and the other thing in which her life-work was involved. She became severe. "It is compromising with evil," she said.

"No. It's getting a breakfast-roll instead of the whole bakery," he answered.

"What do you think?" she exclaimed, turning to Kingsley.

"I think there's one man in Egypt who keeps the boiler from bursting," he answered.

"Oh, don't think I undervalue his Excellency here," she said with a little laugh. "It is because he is strong, because he matters so much, that one feels he could do more. Ismail thinks there is no one like him in the world."

"Except Gordon," interrupted Kingsley.

"Except Gordon, of course; only Gordon isn't in Egypt. And he would do no good in Egypt. The officials would block his way. It is only in the Soudan that he could have a free hand, be of real use. There, a man, a real man, like Gordon, could show the world how civilisation can be accepted by desert races, despite a crude and cruel religion and low standards of morality."

"All races have their social codes--what they call civilisation," rejoined Kingsley. "It takes a long time to get custom out of the blood, especially when it is part of the religion. I'm afraid that expediency isn't the motto of those who try to civilise the Orient and the East."

"I believe in struggling openly for principle," she observed a little acidly.

"Have you succeeded?" he asked, trying to keep his gravity. "How about your own household, for instance? Have you Christianised and civilised your people--your niggers, and the others?"

She flushed indignantly, but held herself in control. She rang a bell. "I have no 'niggers,'" she answered quietly. "I have some Berberine servants, two fellah boatmen, an Egyptian gardener, an Arab cook, and a Circassian maid. They are, I think, devoted to me."

A Berberine servant appeared. "Tea, Mahommed," she said. "And tell Madame that Donovan Pasha is here. My cousin admires his Excellency so much," she added to Kingsley, laughing. "I have never had any real trouble with them," she continued with a little gesture of pride towards the disappearing Berberine.

"There was the Armenian," put in Dicky slyly; "and the Copt sarraf. They were no credit to their Christian religion, were they?"

"That was not the fault of the religion, but of the generations of oppression--they lie as a child lies, to escape consequences. Had they not been oppressed they would have been good Christians in practice as in precept."

"They don't steal as a child steals," laughed Dicky.

"Armenians are Oriental through and through. They no more understand the Christian religion than the Soudanese understand freedom."

He touched the right note this time. Kingsley flashed a half-startled, half-humorous look at him; the face of the lady became set, her manner delicately frigid. She was about to make a quiet, severe reply, but something overcame her, and her eyes, her face, suddenly glowed. She leaned forward, her hands clasped tightly on her knees--Kingsley could not but note how beautiful and brown they were, capable, handsome, confident hands--and, in a voice thrilling with feeling, said:

"What is there in the life here that gets into the eyes of Europeans and blinds them? The United States spent scores of thousands of lives to free the African slave. England paid millions, and sacrificed ministries and men, to free the slave; and in England, you--you, Donovan Pasha, and men like you, would be in the van against slavery. Yet here, where England has more influence than any other nation--"

"More power, not influence," Dicky interrupted smiling.

"Here, you endure, you encourage, you approve of it. Here, an Englishman rules a city of slaves in the desert and grows rich out of their labour. What can we say to the rest of the world, while out there in the desert" --her eyes swept over the grey and violet hills--"that man, Kingsley Bey, sets at defiance his race, his country, civilisation, all those things in which he was educated? Egypt will not believe in English civilisation, Europe will not believe in her humanity and honesty, so long as he pursues his wicked course."

She turned with a gesture of impatience, and in silence began to pour the tea the servant had brought, with a message that Madame had a headache. Kingsley Bey was about to speak--it was so unfair to listen, and she would forgive this no more readily than she would forgive slavery. Dicky intervened, however.

"He isn't so black as he's painted, personally. He's a rash, inflammable sort of fellow, who has a way with the native--treats him well, too, I believe. Very flamboyant, doomed to failure, so far as his merit is concerned, but with an incredible luck. He gambled, and he lost a dozen times; and then gambled again, and won. That's the truth, I fancy. No real stuff in him whatever."

Their hostess put down her tea-cup, and looked at Dicky in blank surprise. Not a muscle in his face moved. She looked at Kingsley. He had difficulty in restraining himself, but by stooping to give her fox- terrier a piece of cake, he was able to conceal his consternation.

"I cannot--cannot believe it," she said slowly. "The British Consul does not speak of him like that."

"He is a cousin of the Consul," urged Dicky. "Cousin--what cousin? I never heard--he never told me that."

"Oh, nobody tells anything in Egypt, unless he's kourbashed or thumb- screwed. It's safer to tell nothing, you know."

"Cousin! I didn't know there were Kingsleys in that family. What reason could the Consul have for hiding the relationship?"

"Well, I don't know, you must ask Kingsley. Flamboyant and garrulous as he is, he probably won't tell you that."

"If I saw Kingsley Bey, I should ask him questions which interest me more. I should prefer, however, to ask them through a lawyer--to him in the prisoner's dock."

"You dislike him intensely?"

"I detest him for what he has done; but I do not despise him as you suggest I should. Flamboyant, garrulous--I don't believe that. I think him, feel him, to be a hard man, a strong man, and a bad man--if not wholly bad."

"Yet you would put him in the prisoner's dock," interposed Kingsley musingly, and wondering how he was to tell her that Lord Selden and Kingsley Bey were one and the same person.

"Certainly. A man who commits public wrongs should be punished. Yet I am sorry that a man so capable should be so inhuman."

"Your grandfather was inhuman," put in Kingsley. "He owned great West Indian slave properties.

"He was culpable, and should have been punished--and was; for we are all poor at last. The world has higher, better standards now, and we should live up to them. Kingsley Bey should live up to them."

"I suppose we might be able to punish him yet," said Dicky meditatively. "If Ismail turned rusty, we could soon settle him, I fancy. Certainly, you present a strong case." He peered innocently into the distance.

"But could it be done--but would you?" she asked, suddenly leaning forward. "If you would, you could--you could!"

"If I did it at all, if I could make up my mind to it, it should be done thoroughly--no half measures."

"What would be the whole measures?" she asked eagerly, but with a certain faint shrinking, for Dicky seemed cold-blooded.

"Of course you never could tell what would happen when Ismail throws the slipper. This isn't a country where things are cut and dried, and done according to Hoyle. You get a new combination every time you pull a string. Where there's no system and a thousand methods you have to run risks. Kingsley Bey might get mangled in the machinery."

She shrank a little. "It is all barbarous."

"Well, I don't know. He is guilty, isn't he? You said you would like to see him in the prisoner's dock. You would probably convict him of killing as well as slavery. You would torture him with prison, and then hang him in the end. Ismail would probably get into a rage--pretended, of course--and send an army against him. Kingsley would make a fight for it, and lose his head--all in the interest of a sudden sense of duty on the part of the Khedive. All Europe would applaud--all save England, and what could she do? Can she defend slavery? There'll be no kid-gloved justice meted out to Kingsley by the Khedive, if he starts a campaign against him. He will have to take it on the devil's pitchfork. You must be logical, you know.

"You can't have it both ways. If he is to be punished, it must be after the custom of the place. This isn't England."

She shuddered slightly, and Dicky went on: "Then, when his head's off, and his desert-city and his mines are no more, and his slaves change masters, comes a nice question. Who gets his money? Not that there's any doubt about who'll get it, but, from your standpoint, who should get it?"

She shook her head in something like embarrassment.

"Money got by slavery--yes, who should get it?" interposed Kingsley carefully, for her eyes had turned to him for help. "Would you favour his heirs getting it? Should it go to the State? Should it go to the slaves? Should it go to a fund for agitation against slavery? . . . You, for instance, could make use of a fortune like his in a cause like that, could you not?" he asked with what seemed boyish simplicity.

The question startled her. "I--I don't know. . . . But certainly not," she hastened to add; "I couldn't touch the money. It is absurd-- impossible."

"I can't see that," steadily persisted Kingsley. "This money was made out of the work of slaves. Certainly they were paid--they were, weren't they?" he asked with mock ignorance, turning to Dicky, who nodded assent. "They were paid wages by Kingsley--in kind, I suppose, but that's all that's needed in a country like the Soudan. But still they had to work, and their lives and bodies were Kingsley's for the time being, and the fortune wouldn't have been made without them; therefore, according to the most finely advanced theories of labour and ownership, the fortune is theirs as much as Kingsley's. But, in the nature of things, they couldn't have the fortune. What would they do with it? Wandering tribes don't need money. Barter and exchange of things in kind is the one form of finance in the Soudan. Besides, they'd cut each other's throats the very first day they got the fortune, and it would strew the desert sands. It's all illogical and impossible--"

"Yes, yes, I quite see that," she interposed.

"But you surely can see how the fortune could be applied to saving those races from slavery. What was wrung from the few by forced labour and loss of freedom could be returned to the many by a sort of national salvation. You could spend the fortune wisely--agents and missionaries everywhere; in the cafes, in the bazaars, in the palace, at court. Judicious gifts: and, at last, would come a firman or decree putting down slavery, on penalty of death. The fortune would all go, of course, but think of the good accomplished!"

"You mean that the fortune should be spent in buying the decree--in backsheesh?" she asked bewildered, yet becoming indignant.

"Well, it's like company promoting," Dicky interposed, hugely enjoying the comedy, and thinking that Kingsley had put the case shrewdly. It was sure to confuse her. "You have to clear the way, as it were. The preliminaries cost a good deal, and those who put the machinery in working order have to be paid. Then there's always some important person who holds the key of the situation; his counsel has to be asked. Advice is very expensive."

"It is gross and wicked!" she flashed out.

"But if you got your way? If you suppressed Kingsley Bey, rid the world of him--well, well, say, banished him," he quickly added, as he saw her fingers tremble--" and got your decree, wouldn't it be worth while? Fire is fought with fire, and you would be using all possible means to do what you esteem a great good. Think of it--slavery abolished, your work accomplished, Kingsley Bey blotted out!"

Light and darkness were in her face at once. Her eyes were bright, her brows became knitted, her foot tapped the floor. Of course it was all make-believe, this possibility, but it seemed too wonderful to think of --slavery abolished, and through her; and Kingsley Bey, the renegade Englishman, the disgrace to his country, blotted out.

"Your argument is not sound in many ways," she said at last, trying to feel her course. "We must be just before all. The whole of the fortune was not earned by slaves. Kingsley Bey's ability and power were the original cause of its existence. Without him there would have been no fortune. Therefore, it would not be justice to give it, even indirectly, to the slaves for their cause."

"It would be penalty--Kingsley Bey's punishment," said Dicky slyly.

"But I thought he was to be blotted out," she said ironically, yet brightening, for it seemed to her that she was proving herself statesmanlike, and justifying her woman's feelings as well.

"When he is blotted out, his fortune should go where it can remedy the evil of his life."

"He may have been working for some good cause," quietly put in Kingsley. "Should not that cause get the advantage of his 'ability and power,' as you have called it, even though he was mistaken, or perverted, or cruel? Shouldn't an average be struck between the wrong his 'ability and power' did and the right that same 'ability and power' was intended to advance?"

She turned with admiration to Kingsley. "How well you argue--I remember you did years ago. I hate slavery and despise and hate slave-dealers and slave-keepers, but I would be just, too, even to Kingsley Bey. But what cause, save his own comfort and fortune, would he be likely to serve? Do you know him?" she added eagerly.

"Since I can remember," answered Kingsley, looking through the field- glasses at a steamer coming up the river.

"Would you have thought that he would turn out as he has?" she asked simply. "You see, he appears to me so dark and baleful a figure that I cannot quite regard him as I regard you, for instance. I could not realise knowing such a man."

"He had always a lot of audacity," Kingsley replied slowly, "and he certainly was a schemer in his way, but that came from his helpless poverty."

"Was he very poor?" she asked eagerly.

"Always. And he got his estates heavily encumbered. Then there were people--old ladies--to have annuities, and many to be provided for, and there was little chance in England for him. Good-temper and brawn weren't enough."

"Egypt's the place for mother-wit," broke in Dicky. "He had that anyhow. As to his unscrupulousness, of course that's as you may look at it."

"Was he always unscrupulous?" she asked. "I have thought him cruel and wicked nationally--un-English, shamefully culpable; but a man who is unscrupulous would do mean low things, and I should like to think that Kingsley is a villain with good points. I believe he has them, and I believe that deep down in him is something English and honourable after all--something to be reckoned with, worked on, developed. See, here is a