turban two locks of iron-grey fell like a shaggy mane over his ears.

But Israel did not flinch. With a look of quiet majesty, standing face
to face with the tyrant, not a foot's length between them, he spoke
again and said, "Basha, I do not envy you, but neither will I share your
business nor your rewards. I mean to be your scapegoat no more. Here is
your seal. It is red with the blood of your unhappy people through these
five-and-twenty bad years past. I can carry it no longer. Take it."

In a tempest of wrath Ben Aboo struck the seal out of Israel's hand as
he offered it, and the silver rolled and rang on the tiled pavement of
the patio.

"Fool!" he cried. "So this is what it is! Allah! In the name of the most
merciful God, who would have believed it? Israel ben Oliel a prophet! A
prophet of the poor! O Merciful! O Compassionate!"

Thus, in his frenzy, pretending to imitate with airs of manifest mockery
his outbreak of fear a few minutes before, Ben Aboo raved and raged and
lifted his clenched fist to the sky in sham imprecation of God.

"Who said it was the Sultan?" he cried again. "He was a fool. Abd
er-Rahman? No; but Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! That's it!
That's it!"

So saying, and forgetting in his fury what he had said before of
Mohammed himself, he laughed wildly, and beat about the patio from side
to side like a caged and angry beast.

"And if I am a tyrant," he said in a thick voice, "who made me so? If
I oppress the poor, who taught me the way to do it? Whose clever brain
devised new means of revenue? Ransoms, promissory notes, bonds, false
judgments--what did I know of such things? Who changed the silver
dollars at nine ducats apiece? And who bought up the debts of the people
that murmured against such robbery? Allah! Allah! Whose crafty head
did all this? Why, yours--yours--Israel ben Oliel! By the beard of the
Prophet, I swear it!"

Israel stood unmoved, and when these reproaches were hurled at him, he
answered calmly and sadly, "God's ways are not our ways, neither are
His thoughts our thoughts. He works His own will, and we are but His
ministers. I thought God's justice had failed, but it has overtaken
myself. For what I did long ago of my own free will and intention to
oppress the poor, I have suffered and still am suffering."

All this time the Spanish wife of Ben Aboo had sat in the alcove with
lips whitening under their crimson patches of paint, beating her fan
restlessly