perfect official. Initiative was his strong point, independence his
life; he loathed the machine of system in so far as he could not command
it; he revolted at being a cog in the wheel. Ismail had discovered this,
and Dicky had been made a kind of confidential secretary who seldom wrote
a line. By his influence with Ismail he had even more power at last than
the Chief Eunuch or the valet-de-chambre, before whom the highest
officials bowed low. He was hated profoundly by many of the household,
cultivated by certain of the Ministers, fawned upon by outsiders, trusted
by the Khedive, and entirely believed in by the few Englishmen and
Frenchmen who worked for decent administration faithfully but without
hope and sometimes with nausea.

It was nausea that had seized upon Dicky at last, nausea and one other
thing--the spirit of adventure, an inveterate curiosity. His was the
instinct of the explorer, his feet were the feet of the Wandering Jew.
He knew things behind closed doors by instinct; he was like a thought-
reader in the sure touch of discovery; the Khedive looked upon him as
occult almost and laughed in the face of Sadik the Mouffetish when he
said some evil things of Dicky. Also, the Khedive told the Mouffetish
that if any harm came to Dicky there would come harm to him. The Khedive
loved to play one man off against another, and the death of Sadik or the
death of Dicky would have given him no pain, if either seemed necessary.
For the moment, however, he loved them both after his fashion; for Sadik
lied to him, and squeezed the land dry, and flailed it with kourbashes
for gold for his august master and himself; and Dicky told him the truth
about everything--which gave the Khedive knowledge of how he really stood
all round.

Dicky told the great spendthrift the truth about himself; but he did not
tell the truth when he said he was going to England on a visit to his