sustaining, invested
and invulnerable wealth.

Unexpectedly Aimee laughed. "He must be very plain," she declared,
her face brightening with mockery, "if you take so long to tell me
his name!"

Not, she added to herself under her breath, that any name would
weigh a feather's difference!

"On the contrary," and the pasha's eyes met hers frankly for the
first time and he seemed delighted to indulge a laugh, "he has the
reputation of good looks. He is much _a la mode_."

"Beautiful and golden--did you meet him just to-night, my father?"
Aimee went on, in that light audacity which he had loved to indulge.

Now he smiled, but his glance went uneasily away from her.

"Not at all. This is a serious affair, you understand--the devil of
a serious affair!" and for the first time she felt she heard the
accents of his candor.

But again he was back to voluble protestation. This man was really
an old friend. He boggled over the word, then got it out resonantly.
A man he knew well. Not a young man, perhaps--certainly he was not
going to hand his only daughter to any boy, a mere novice in
life!--but a man who could give her the position she deserved. Not
only a rich man, but an influential one.

His name, he brought out at last, was Hamdi Bey. He was a general in
the armies of the sultan.

It was a long moment before she could piece any shreds of
recollection together.

Hamdi Bey ... A general.... Why, that was a man her father had
disliked ... more than once he had dropped resentful phrases of his
airs, his arrogance ... had recounted certain clashes with malicious
joy.

And now he was planning--no, seriously announcing--

A general ... He must be terribly old....

Not that it made any difference. Old or young, black or white,
general or ghikar, would mean nothing in her life. She would have
none of him ... none of him.... Never would she endure the
humiliation of being handed over like a toy, an odalisque, a
slave....

What had happened? She could only suppose that her father had been
overcome by that wealth of the general's on which he had made her
such a speech. Or perhaps his dislike of Hamdi had been founded on
nothing but resentment of Hamdi's airs of superiority, and now that
the bey was condescending to ask for her hand her father's flattered
appeasement was rushing into genial acceptance.

Anything might be possible to Tewfick Pasha's eternally youthful
enthusiasms.

She told her frightened heart that