is budget.

"Do you mind my speaking to you in English?" he said. "I have got to
say things which I should find it difficult to explain in a foreign
language, which I have very imperfectly picked up, and which may not
have idioms answering to the English."

"I do not love the English tongue," said the sheikh, using it, however.
"But what things do you allude to?"

"Family matters, affecting my mother and all of us--you, perhaps."

"When I last went to England," said the sheikh, "I took a final farewell
of all relatives, and of everything belonging to the country from which
I shook off the dust on my feet, you only excepted, for I saw that you,
too, were called out of the seething hotbed of corruption, which is
called civilisation, to the natural life of man. Why disturb the ashes
of the buried past?"

"I love my mother," replied Harry; "and you, her brother, once loved her
too."

His uncle bowed his head. "True," he said; "speak on."

"And besides," added Harry, "justice is justice all the world over, and
crime should not prosper. Richard Burke, your brother, died at his home
in Ireland. He had made two wills, one leaving the bulk of his fortune
to his step-son, Stephen Philipson, and another, and later one, made on
the occasion of Philipson turning out badly, leaving him a modest
allowance, and bequeathing the bulk of his fortune between his sister
and Reginald Kavanagh. This will, which would make my mother and
Beatrice comfortable, as they have been brought up to esteem comfort,
was not to be found; neither was the other. A dishonest clerk, forced
to fly the country because a forgery he had committed must soon be
discovered, stole them both out of the lawyer's office where he was
employed, for the purpose of levying a sum for giving them to one or the
other of the parties interested. But the police were too close on his
traces, and he had to fly without a chance of making use of either
document. He was an Egyptian, and went home; but not feeling safe at
Alexandria or Cairo, and having connections in the Soudan, he came to
this country. If both wills are destroyed, part of the property comes
to you."

"And the cause has need of funds!" exclaimed the sheikh. "But how shall
we find this dog?"

"I saw him the other day in the bazaar; his name is Daireh."

"Daireh, the money-lender, against whom I have had so many complaints,
but who always manages to have the law on his side?"

"The very same."