troubled or when he was
setting his mind to a task.

The hat was not there; but Hope's eyes were on his, and there were a
hundred Quaker hats or Cardinals' hats in them. He reached out quickly
and caught Hope's hand as it undid the strings of her grey bonnet. "Will
thee be mad, Hope?"

"All the world's mad but thee and me, David, and thee's a bit mad," she
answered in the tongue of Framley.

"The gaud upon thy hand?" he asked sternly; and his eyes flashed from
her to Shelek Pasha, for a horrible suspicion crept into his brain--a
shameless suspicion; but even a Quaker may be human and foolish, as
history has shown.

"The wine at thine elbow, David, and thine hat!" she answered steadily.

David, the friend of peace, was bitterly angry. He caught up the glass
of champagne and dashed it upon the fine prayer-rug which Shelek Pasha
had, with a kourbash, collected for taxes from a Greek merchant back
from Tiflis--the rug worth five hundred English pounds, the taxes but
twenty Turkish pounds.

"Thee is a villain, friend," he said to Shelek Pasha in a voice like a
noise in a barrel; "I read thee as a book."

"But through the eyes of your wife, effendi; she read me first--we
understand each other!" answered the Governor with a hateful smile,
knowing the end of one game was at hand, and beginning another instantly
with an intelligent malice.

Against all Quaker principles David's sinful arm was lifted to strike,
but Hope's hand prevented him, and Shelek Pasha motioned back the
Abyssinian slaves who had sprung forward menacingly from behind a
screen.

Hope led the outraged David, hatless, into the street.

III

That evening the Two Strange People went to Abdul Huseyn, the jeweller,
and talked with him for more than an hour; for Abdul Huseyn, as
Egyptians go, was a kindly man. He had taught Arabic to David and Hope.
He would have asked more than twelve pieces of silver to betray them.

The next afternoon a riot occurred around the house of the Two Strange
People and the school they had built; and Shelek Pasha would have had
his spite of them, and his will of the donkey-market, the school, and
the cotton-fields, but for Abdul Huseyn and three Sheikhs, friends of
his--at a price--who addressed the crowd and quieted them. They declared
that the Two were mad folk with whom even the English folk would have
naught to do; that they were of those from whom God had taken the souls,
leaving their foolish bodies on earth, and