l re-action between intense
selfishness and morbid sensibility?

Had Fakredeen married Eva, the union might have given him some
steadiness of character, or at least its semblance. The young Emir had
greatly desired this alliance, not for the moral purpose that we have
intimated, not even from love of Eva, for he was totally insensible
to domestic joys, but because he wished to connect himself with great
capitalists, and hoped to gain the Lebanon loan for a dower. But this
alliance was quite out of the question. The hand of Eva was destined,
according to the custom of the family, for her cousin, the eldest son of
Besso of Aleppo. The engagement had been entered into while she was at
Vienna, and it was then agreed that the marriage should take place soon
after she had completed her eighteenth year. The ceremony was therefore
at hand; it was to occur within a few months.

Accustomed from an early period of life to the contemplation of this
union, it assumed in the eyes of Eva a character as natural as that of
birth or death. It never entered her head to ask herself whether she
liked or disliked it. It was one of those inevitable things of which we
are always conscious, yet of which we never think, like the years of our
life or the colour of our hair. Had her destiny been in her own hands,
it is probable that she would not have shared it with Fakredeen, for she
had never for an instant entertained the wish that there should be any
change in the relations which subsisted between them. According to the
custom of the country, it was to Besso that Fakredeen had expressed his
wishes and his hopes. The young Emir made liberal offers: his wife and
children might follow any religion they pleased; nay, he was even ready
to conform himself to any which they fixed upon. He attempted to
dazzle Besso with the prospect of a Hebrew Prince of the Mountains. 'My
daughter,' said the merchant, 'would certainly, under any circumstances,
marry one of her own faith; but we need not say another word about it;
she is betrothed, and has been engaged for some years, to her cousin.'

When Fakredeen, during his recent visit to Bethany, found that Eva,
notwithstanding her Bedouin blood, received his proposition for
kidnapping a young English nobleman with the utmost alarm and even
horror, he immediately relinquished it, diverted her mind from the
contemplation of a project on her disapproval of which, notwithstanding
his efforts at distraction, she s