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 poun