in, "if you must
give up your seal, why should you do it like a fool? Could you not come
to me and say, 'Kaid, I am old and weary; I am rich, and have enough; I
have served you long and faithfully; let me rest'--why not? I say, why
not?"

Israel answered calmly, "Because it would have been a lie, Basha."

"So it would," cried Ben Aboo sharply, "so it would: you are right--it
would have been a lie, an accursed lie! But why must you come to me and
say, 'Basha, you are a tyrant, and have made me a tyrant also; you have
sucked the blood of your people, and made me to drink it."

"Because it is true, Basha," said Israel.

At that Ben-Aboo stopped suddenly, and his swarthy face grew hideous and
awful. Then, pointing with one shaking hand at the farther end of the
patio, he said, "There is another thing that is true. It is true that on
the other side of that wall there is a prison," and, lifting his voice
to a shriek, he added, "you are on the edge of a gulf, Israel ben Oliel.
One step more--"

But just at that moment Israel turned full upon him, face to face, and
the threat that he was about to utter seemed to die in his stifling
throat. If only he could have provoked Israel to anger he might have
had his will of him. But that slow, impassive manner, and that worn
countenance so noble in sadness and suffering, was like a rebuke of his
passion, and a retort upon his words.

And truly it seemed to Israel that against the Basha's story of his
ingratitude he could tell a different tale. This pitiful slave of
rage and fear, this thing of rags and patches, this whining, maudlin,
shrieking, bleating, barking-creature that hurled reproaches at him, was
the master in whose service he had spent his best brain and best blood.
But for the strong hand that he had lent him, but for the cool head
wherewith he had guarded him, where would the man be now? In the
dungeons of Abd er-Rahman, having gone thither by way of the Sultan's
wooden jellabs and his houses of fierce torture. By the mind's eye
Israel could see him there at that instant--sightless, eyeless, hungry,
gaunt. But no, he was still here--fat, sleek, voluptuous, imperious. And
good men lay perishing in his prisons, and children, starved to death,
lay in their graves, and he himself, his servant and scapegoat, whose
brains he had drained, whose blood he had sweated, stood before him
there like an old lion, who had been wandering far and was beaten back
by his cubs.

But wh