e between his Excellency and this. Poor Najma has not
the courage to die, and so soon. Her cousin Khalid is in prison,
is excommunicated--what can she do? Run away? The Church will
follow her--punish her. There's something satanic in Khalid--the
Church said so--the Church knows. Najma rolls these things in her
mind, looks at her father beseechingly. Her father points to the
noose. Najma falls to weeping. The noose serves well its purpose.

For hereafter, when the Dodo comes decorated, SHE has to offer him the
cushion, bring him the _masnad_, make for him the coffee. And
eventually, as the visits accumulate, she goes with him to the
dress-maker in Beirut. The bridal gown shall be of the conventional
silk this time; for his Excellency is travelled, and knows and
reverences the fashion. But why prolong these painful details?

"Allah, in the mysterious working of his Providence," says Shakib,
"preordained it thus: Khalid, having served his turn in prison, Najma
begins her own; for a few days after he was set free, she was placed
in bonds forged for her by the Jesuits. Now, when Khalid returned from
Damascus, he came straightway to me and asked that we go to see Najma
and try to prevail upon her, to persuade her to go with him, to run
away. They would leave on the night-train to Hama this time, and
thence set forth towards Palmyra. I myself did not know what had
happened, and so I approved of his plan. But alas! as we were coming
down the main Street to Najma's house, we heard the sound of tomtoms
in the distance and the shrill ulluluing of women. We continued apace
until we reached the by-way through which we had to pass, and lo, we
find it choked by the _zeffah_ (wedding procession) of none but she
and the third-class Medjidi...."

* * * * *

But we'll no more of this! Too tragic, too much like fiction it
sounds, that here abruptly we must end this Chapter.

CHAPTER VIII

THE KAABA OF SOLITUDE

Disappointed, distraught, diseased,--worsted by the Jesuits,
excommunicated, crossed in love,--but with an eternal glint of
sunshine in his breast to open and light up new paths before him,
Khalid, after the fatal episode, makes away from Baalbek. He suddenly
disappears. But where he lays his staff, where he spends his months of
solitude, neither Shakib nor our old friend the sandomancer can say.
Somewhither he still is, indeed; for though he fell in a swoon as he
saw Najma