rmly told that the Friends wore no jewelry nor
gay attire. Shelek Pasha, being a Christian--after the Armenian
fashion--then desired to learn of this strange religion, that his own
nature might be bettered, for, alas! snares for the soul are many in the
Orient. For this Hope had quietly but firmly referred him to David.

Then he had tried another tack: he had thrown in his interest with her
first school in his mudirieh; he got her Arab teachers from Cairo who
could speak English; he opened the large schoolhouse himself with great
ceremony, and with many kavasses in blue and gold. He said to himself
that you never could tell what would happen in this world, and it was
well to wait, and to watch the approach of that good angel Opportunity.

With all his devices, however, he could not quite understand Hope, and
he walked warily, lest through his lack of understanding he should, by
some mischance, come suddenly upon a reef, and his plans go shipwreck.
Yet all the time he laughed in his sleeve, for he foresaw the day when
all this money the Two Strange People were spending in his mudirieh
should become his own. If he could not get their goods and estates
peaceably, riots were so easy to arrange; he had arranged them before.
Then, when the Two Strange People had been struck with panic, the Syrian
donkey-market, and the five hundred feddans of American cotton, and the
new schools would be his for a song--or a curse.

When he saw the turquoise ring on the finger of the little Quaker lady
he fancied he could almost hear the accompaniment of the song. He tore
away tender portions of roasted lamb with his fingers, and crammed them
into his mouth, rejoicing. With the same greasy fingers he put upon
Hope's plate a stuffed cucumber, and would have added a clammy sweet
and a tumbler of sickly sherbet at the same moment; but Hope ate nothing
save a cake of dourha bread, and drank only a cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, Shelek Pasha talked of the school, of the donkey-market,
the monopoly of which the Khedive had granted David; and of the
new prosperous era opening up in Egypt, due to the cotton David had
introduced as an experiment. David's heart waxed proud within him
that he had walked out of Framley to the regeneration of a country. He
likened himself to Joseph, son of Jacob; and at once the fineness of his
first purposes became blunted.

As Shelek Pasha talked on, of schools, of taxes, of laws, of government,
to David, with no hat on