Dicky's thousand had brought him five thousand, and Ismail's three
thousand had become fifteen thousand, and another twenty thousand
besides. For once the Khedive had found a kind of taxation, of which he
got the whole proceeds, not divided among many as heretofore. He got it
all. He made Kingsley a Bey, and gave him immunity from all other
imposts or taxation. Nothing but an Egyptian army could have removed him
from his desert-city.

Now, he was coming back--to-night at ten o'clock he would appear at the
Khedivial Club, the first time in seven years. But this was not all. He
was coming back to be married as soon as might be.

This was the thing which convulsed Dicky.

Upon the Nile at Assiout lived a young English lady whose life was
devoted to agitation against slavery in Egypt. Perhaps the Civil War in
America, not so many years before, had fired her spirit; perhaps it was
pious enthusiasm; perhaps it was some altruistic sentiment in her which
must find expression; perhaps, as people said, she had had a love affair
in England which had turned out badly. At any rate she had come over to
Egypt with an elderly companion, and, after a short stay at the
Consulate, had begun the career of the evangel. She had now and then
created international difficulty, and Ismail, tolerant enough, had been
tempted to compel her to leave the country, but, with a zeal which took
on an aspect of self-opinionated audacity, she had kept on. Perhaps her
beauty helped her on her course--perhaps the fact that her superb egotism
kept her from being timorous, made her career possible. In any case,
there she was at Assiout, and there she had been for years, and no
accident had come to her; and, during the three months she was at
Cairo every year, pleading against slavery and the corvee, she increased