with David for co-operation.
Armenian Christian Nahoum might be, but he was ranged with the East
against the West, with the reactionary and corrupt against advance,
against civilisation and freedom and equality. Nahoum's Christianity was
permeated with Orientalism, the Christian belief obscured by the theism
of the Muslim. David was in a deadlier struggle than he knew. Yet it
could serve no good end to attempt to warn him now. He had outlived
peril so far; might it not be that, after all, he would win?

So far she had avoided Nahoum's name in talks with David. She could
scarcely tell why she did, save that it opened a door better closed, as
it were; but the restraint had given way at last.

"Thee remembers what I said that night?" David repeated slowly.

"I remember--I understand. You devise your course and you never change.
It is like building on a rock. That is why nothing happens to you as bad
as might happen."

"Nothing bad ever happens to me."

"The philosophy of the desert," she commented smiling. "You are living
in the desert even when you are here. This is a dream; the desert and
Egypt only are real.

"That is true, I think. I seem sometimes like a sojourner here, like a
spirit 'revisiting the scenes of life and time.'" He laughed boyishly.

"Yet you are happy here. I understand now why and how you are what you
are. Even I that have been here so short a time feel the influence upon
me. I breathe an air that, somehow, seems a native air. The spirit of
my Quaker grandmother revives in me. Sometimes I sit hours thinking,
scarcely stirring; and I believe I know now how people might speak to
each other without words. Your Uncle Benn and you--it was so with
you, was it not? You heard his voice speaking to you sometimes; you
understood what he meant to say to you? You told me so long ago."

David inclined his head. "I heard him speak as one might speak through
a closed door. Sometimes, too, in the desert I have heard Faith speak to
me."

"And your grandfather?"

"Never my grandfather--never. It would seem as though, in my thoughts,
I could never reach him; as though masses of opaque things lay between.
Yet he and I--there is love between us. I don't know why I never hear
him."

"Tell me of your childhood, of your mother. I have seen her grave under
the ash by the Meeting-house, but I want to know of her from you."

"Has not Faith told you?"

"We have only talked of the present. I could not ask her; but