he Canon Law, about alms and
spiritual beggars, might cut the Gordian knot with your uncle,
but--and whether it be good or bad English, we say it--they cut no ice
with the Church. Yes, Mother Church, under whose wings you and your
cousin were born and bred, and under whose wings you and your cousin
would be married, can not take off for the sweet sake of your black
eyes the ruffles and flounces of twenty centuries. Think well on it,
you who have so extravagantly and not unwisely delivered yourself on
flounces and ruffles. But to think, when in love, were, indeed,
disastrous. O Love, Love, what Camels of wisdom thou canst force to
pass through the needle's eye! What miracles divine are thine! Khalid
himself says that to be truly, deeply, piously in love, one must needs
hate himself. How true, how inexorably true! For would he be always
inviting trouble and courting affliction, would he be always bucking
against the dead wall of a Democracy or a Church, if he did not
sincerely hate himself--if he were not religiously, fanatically in
love--in love with Najma, if not with Truth?

Now, on the following Sunday, instead of publishing the intended
marriage of Khalid and Najma, the parish priest places a ban upon it.
And in this, ye people of Baalbek, is food enough for tattle, and
cause enough for persecution. Potent are the ruffles of the Church!
But why, we can almost hear the anxious Reader asking, if the camels
are ready, why the deuce don't they get on and get them gone? But did
we not say once that Khalid is slow, even slower than the law itself?
Nevertheless, if this were a Novel, an elopement would be in order,
but we must repeat, it is not. We are faithful transcribers of the
truth as we find it set down in Shakib's _Histoire Intime_.

True, Khalid did ask Najma to throw with him the handful of dust, to
steal out of Baalbek and get married on the way, say in Damascus. But
poor Najma goes over to his mother instead, and mingling their tears
and prayers, they beseech the Virgin to enlighten the soul and mind of
Khalid. "Yes, we must be married here, before we go to the desert,"
says she, "for think, O my mother, how far away we shall be from the
world and the Church if anything happens to us."

And they would have succeeded, the mother and cousin of Khalid, in
persuading the parish priest to accept from them the prescribed alms
and perform the wedding ceremony, had not the Jesuits, in the interest
of the Faith and the