ceive any day, I
advise you to spirit him away at once.'"

But though the Jesuits have succeeded in kicking Khalid out of his
home, they did not succeed, thanks to Shakib, in sending him to the
Bosphorus. Meanwhile, they sit quiet, hatching another egg.

CHAPTER VI

FLOUNCES AND RUFFLES

Now, that there is a lull in the machinations of Jesuitry, we shall
turn a page or two in Shakib's account of the courting of Khalid. And
apparently everything is propitious. The fates, at least, in the
beginning, are not unkind. For the feud between Khalid's father and
uncle shall now help to forward Khalid's love-affair. Indeed, the
father of Najma, to spite his brother, opens to the banished nephew
his door and blinks at the spooning which follows. And such an
interminable yarn our Scribe spins out about it, that Khalid and Najma
do seem the silliest lackadaisical spoonies under the sun. But what we
have evolved from the narration might have for our readers some
curious alien phase of interest.

Here then are a few beads from Shakib's romantic string. When Najma
cooks _mojadderah_ for her father, he tells us, she never fails to
come to the booth of pine boughs with a platter of it. And this to
Khalid was very manna. For never, while supping on this single dish,
would he dream of the mensal and kitchen luxuries of the Hermitage in
Bronx Park. In fact, he never envied the pork-eating Americans, the
beef-eating English, or the polyphagic French. "Here is a dish of
lentils fit for the gods," he would say....

When Najma goes to the spring for water, Khalid chancing to meet her,
takes the jar from her shoulder, saying, "Return thou home; I will
bring thee water." And straightway to the spring hies he, where the
women there gathered fill his ears with tittering, questioning tattle
as he is filling his jar. "I wish I were Najma," says one, as he
passes by, the jar of water on his shoulder. "Would you cement his
brain, if you were?" puts in another. And thus would they gibe and
joke every time Khalid came to the spring with Najma's jar....

One day he comes to his uncle's house and finds his betrothed
ribboning and beading some new lingerie for her rich neighbour's
daughter. He sits down and helps her in the work, writing meanwhile,
between the acts, an alphabetic ideology on Art and Life. But as they
are beading the vests and skirts and other articles of richly laced
linen underwear, Najma holds up one of these and naively