l between you. But is she still blind? So? Dear me! Blind,
poor child. Think of it!"

Israel neither answered nor looked up, but stood motionless on the
same place, holding the seal in his hand. And Ben Aboo, in his restless
tramping up and down, came to him again, and said, "Why are you a Jew,
Israel ben Oliel? The dogs of your people hate you. Witness to the
Prophet! Resign yourself! Turn Muslim, man--what's to hinder you?"

Still Israel made no reply. But Ben Aboo continued: "Listen! The people
about me are in the pay of the Sultan, and after all you are the best
servant I have ever had. Say the Kelmah, and I'll make you my Khaleefa.
Do you hear?--my Khaleefa, with power equal to my own. Man, why don't
you speak? Are you grown stupid of late as well as weak and womanish?"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE LIGHT-BORN MESSENGER

"Basha," said Israel--he spoke slowly and quietly; but with forced
calmness--"Basha, you must seek another hand for work like that--this
hand of mine shall never seal that warrant."

"Tut, man!" whispered Ben Aboo. "Do your new measles break out
everywhere? Am I not Kaid? Can I not make you my Khaleefa?"

Israel's face was worn and pale, but his eye burned with the fire of his
great resolve.

"Basha," he said again calmly and quietly, "if you were Sultan and could
make me your Vizier, I would not do it."

"Why?" cried Ben Aboo; "why? why?"

"Because," said Israel, "I am here to deliver up your seal to you."

"You? Grace of God!" cried Ben Aboo.

"I am here," continued Israel, as calmly as before, "to resign my
office."

"Resign your office? Deliver up your seal?" cried Ben Aboo. "Man, man,
are you mad?"

"No, Basha, not to-day," said Israel quietly. "I must have been that
when I came here first, five-and-twenty years ago."

Ben Aboo gnawed his lip and scowled darkly, and in the flush of his
anger, his consternation being over, he would have fallen upon Israel
with torrents of abuse, but that he was smitten suddenly by a new and
terrible thought. Quivering and trembling, and muttering short prayers
under his breath, he recoiled from the place where Israel stood, and
said, "There is something under all this? What is it? Let me think! Let
me think!"

Meantime the face of Katrina beneath its covering of paint had grown
white, and in scarcely smothered tones of wrath, by the swift instinct
of a suspicious nature, she was asking herself the same question, "What
does it mean? What does it