hing to me,
friend?" asked David.

"I'm full up; I can't speak. But, say--"

"I am going to the Palace now. Come back at noon if you will."

He wrung David's hand in gratitude. "You're going to do it. You're going
to do it. I see it. It's a great game--like Abe Lincoln's. Say, let me
black your boots while you're doing it, will you?"

David pressed his hand.

CHAPTER IX. THE LETTER, THE NIGHT, AND THE WOMAN

"To-day has come the fulfilment of my dream, Faith. I am given to
my appointed task; I am set on a road of life in which there is no
looking back. My dreams of the past are here begun in very truth
and fact. When, in the night, I heard Uncle Benn calling, when in
the Meeting-house voices said, 'Come away, come away, and labour,
thou art idle,' I could hear my heart beat in the ardour to be off.
Yet I knew not whither. Now I know.

"Last night the Prince Pasha called me to his Council, made me
adviser, confidant, as one who has the ear of his captain--after he
had come to terms with me upon that which Uncle Benn left of land
and gold. Think not that he tempted me.

"Last night I saw favourites look upon me with hate because of
Kaid's favour, though the great hall was filled with show of
cheerful splendour, and men smiled and feasted. To-day I know that
in the Palace where I was summoned to my first: duty with the
Prince, every step I took was shadowed, every motion recorded, every
look or word noted and set down. I have no fear of them. They are
not subtle enough for the unexpected acts of honesty in the life of
a true man. Yet I do not wonder men fail to keep honest in the
midst of this splendour, where all is strife as to who shall have
the Prince's favour; who shall enjoy the fruits of bribery,
backsheesh, and monopoly; who shall wring from the slave and the
toil-ridden fellah the coin his poor body mints at the corvee, in
his own taxed fields of dourha and cucumbers.

"Is this like anything we ever dreamed at Hamley, Faith? Yet here
am I set, and here shall I stay till the skein be ravelled out.
Soon I shall go into the desert upon a mission to the cities of the
South, to Dongola, Khartoum, and Darfur and beyond; for there is
trouble yonder, and war is near, unless it is given to me to bring
peace. So I must bend to my study of Arabic, which I am thankful I
learned long ago. And I must not forget to say t