Circassian was in her
household, being educated like an English girl, lifted out of her former
degradation, made to understand "a higher life"; and yesterday she had
sent away six liberated slaves, with a gold-piece each, as a gift from
a free woman to free men. It seemed to her for a moment now, as she sat
musing and looking, that her thirty years of life had not been--rather,
might not be-in vain.

There was one other letter she would write--to Donovan Pasha, who had
not been ardent in her cause, yet who might have done so much through
his influence with Ismail, who, it was said, liked him better than any
Englishman he had known, save Gordon. True, Donovan Pasha had steadily
worked for the reduction of the corvee, and had, in the name of the
Khedive, steadily reduced private corvee, but he had never set his face
against slavery, save to see that no slave-dealing was permitted below
Assouan. Yet, with her own eyes she had seen Abyssinian slaves sold in
the market-place of Assiout. True, when she appealed to him, Donovan
Pasha had seen to it that the slave-dealers were severely punished, but
the fact remained that he was unsympathetic on the large issue. When
appealed to, the British Consul had petulantly told her that Donovan
Pasha was doing more important work. Yet she could only think of England
as the engine of civilisation, as an evangelising power, as the John
the Baptist of the nations--a country with a mission. For so beautiful
a woman, of so worldly a stock, of a society so in the front of things,
she had some Philistine notions, some quite middle-class ideals. It was
like a duchess taking to Exeter Hall; but few duchesses so afflicted had
been so beautiful and so young, so much of the worldly world--her father
was high in the household of an illustrious person.... If she could
but make any headway against slavery--she had as disciples ten Armenian
pashas, several wealthy Copts, a number of Arab sheikhs, and three
Egyptian princes, sympathetic rather than active--perhaps, through her
father, she might be able to move the illustrious person, and so, in
time, the Government of England.

It was a delightful dream--the best she had imagined for many a day. She
was roused from it by the scream of a whistle, and the hoonch-hoonch of
a sternwheel steamer. A Government boat was hastening in to the bank,
almost opposite her house. She picked up the field-glass from the
window-sill behind her, and swept the deck of the