ere to rest until
sunset; and always the burden of his words was the same--the Sultan, the
Sultan, the Sultan, and Abd er-Rahman, Abd er-Rahman!

Israel could bear no more. "Basha," he said "it is a mistake; the Sultan
has not sent for me, and neither am I going to see him."

"Not going to him?" the Kaid echoed vacantly.

"No, but to another," said Israel; "and you of all men can best tell me
where that other is to be found. A great man, newly risen--yet a poor
man--the young Mahdi Mohammed of Mequinez."

Then there was a long silence.

Israel did not rest in Mequinez until sunset of that day. Soon after
sunrise he went out at the gate at which he had so lately entered, and
no man showed him honour. The black guard of the Shereef of Wazzan had
gone off before him, chuckling and grinning in their disgust, and behind
him his own little company of soldiers, guides, muleteers, and tentmen,
who, like himself, had neither slept nor eaten, were dragging along in
dudgeon. The Kaid had turned them out of the town.

Later in the day, while Israel and his people lay sheltering within
their tents on the plain of Sais by the river Nagar, near the
tent-village called a Douar, and the palm-tree by the bridge, there
passed them in the fierce sunshine two men in the peaked shasheeah of
the soldier, riding at a furious gallop from the direction of Fez, and
shouting to all they came upon to fly from the path they had to pass
over. They were messengers of the Sultan, carrying letters to the Kaid
of Mequinez, commanding him to present himself at the palace without
delay, that he might give good account of his stewardship, or else
deliver up his substance and be cast into prison for the defalcations
with which rumour had charged him.

Such was the errand of the soldiers, according to the country-people,
who toiled along after them on their way home from the markets at
Fez; and great was the glee of Israel's men on hearing it, for they
remembered with bitterness how basely the Kaid had treated them at last
in his false loyalty and hypocrisy. But Israel himself was too nearly
touched by a sense of Fate's coquetry to rejoice at this new freak of
its whim, though the victim of it had so lately turned him from his
door. Miserable was the man who laid up his treasure in money-bags and
built his happiness on the favour of princes! When the one was taken
from him and the other failed him, where then was the hope of that man's
salvation, whet