all the time he laughed in his sleeve, for he foresaw the day when all
this money the Two Strange People were spending in his mudirieh should
become his own. If he could not get their goods and estates peaceably,
riots were so easy to arrange; he had arranged them before. Then, when
the Two Strange People had been struck with panic, the Syrian donkey-
market, and the five hundred feddans of American cotton, and the new
schools would be his for a song--or a curse.

When he saw the turquoise ring on the finger of the little Quaker lady he
fancied he could almost hear the accompaniment of the song. He tore away
tender portions of roasted lamb with his fingers, and crammed them into
his mouth, rejoicing. With the same greasy fingers he put upon Hope's
plate a stuffed cucumber, and would have added a clammy sweet and a
tumbler of sickly sherbet at the same moment; but Hope ate nothing save a
cake of dourha bread, and drank only a cup of coffee.

Meanwhile, Shelek Pasha talked of the school, of the donkey-market,
the monopoly of which the Khedive had granted David; and of the new
prosperous era opening up in Egypt, due to the cotton David had
introduced as an experiment. David's heart waxed proud within him that
he had walked out of Framley to the regeneration of a country. He
likened himself to Joseph, son of Jacob; and at once the fineness of his
first purposes became blunted.

As Shelek Pasha talked on, of schools, of taxes, of laws, of government,
to David, with no hat on--Samson without his hair--Hope's mind was
working as it had never worked before. She realised what a prodigious
liar Shelek Pasha was; for, talking benignly of equitable administration
as he did, she recalled the dark stories she had heard of rapine and
cruel imprisonment in this same mudirieh.