--Samson without his hair--Hope's mind was
working as it had never worked before. She realised what a prodigious
liar Shelek Pasha was; for, talking benignly of equitable administration
as he did, she recalled the dark stories she had heard of rapine and
cruel imprisonment in this same mudirieh.

Suddenly Shelek Pasha saw the dark-blue eyes fastened upon his face
with a curious intentness, a strange questioning; and the blue of the
turquoise on the hand folded over the other in the grey lap did not
quite reassure him. He stopped talking, and spoke in a low voice to his
kavass, who presently brought a bottle of champagne--a final proof
that Shelek Pasha was not an ascetic or a Turk. As the bottle was being
opened the Pasha took up his string of beads and began to finger them,
for the blue eyes in the poke bonnet were disconcerting. He was about to
speak when Hope said, in a clear voice:

"Thee has a strange people beneath thee. Thee rules by the sword, or
the word of peace, friend?" The fat, smooth hands fingered the beads
swiftly. Shelek Pasha was disturbed, as he proved by replying in
French--he had spent years of his youth in France: "Par la force
morale, toujours, madame--by moral force, always," he hastened to add
in English. Then, casting down his eyes with truly Armenian modesty,
he continued in Arabic: "By the word of peace, oh woman of the clear
eyes--to whom God give length of days!"

Shelek Pasha smiled a greasy smile, and held the bottle of champagne
over the glass set for friend David.

Never in his life had David the Quaker tasted champagne. In his eyes, in
the eyes of Framley, it had been the brew especially prepared by Sheitan
to tempt to ruin the feeble ones of the earth. But the doublet of
David's mind was all unbraced now; his hat was off, his Quaker drab was
spotted with the grease of a roasted lamb. He had tasted freedom; he was
near to license now.

He took his hand from the top of the glass, and the amber liquid and the
froth poured in. At that instant he saw Hope's eyes upon his, he saw her
hand go to the poke bonnet, as it were to unloosen the strings. He saw
for the first time the turquoise ring; he saw the eyes of Shelek Pasha
on Hope with a look prophesying several kinds of triumph, none palatable
to him; and he stopped short on that road easy of gradient, which Shelek
Pasha was macadamising for him. He put his hand up as though to pull his
hat down over his eyes, as was his fashion when