Baptist of the nations--a country with a mission. For so beautiful a
woman, of so worldly a stock, of a society so in the front of things, she
had some Philistine notions, some quite middle-class ideals. It was like
a duchess taking to Exeter Hall; but few duchesses so afflicted had been
so beautiful and so young, so much of the worldly world--her father was
high in the household of an illustrious person. . . . If she could
but make any headway against slavery--she had as disciples ten Armenian
pashas, several wealthy Copts, a number of Arab sheikhs, and three
Egyptian princes, sympathetic rather than active--perhaps, through her
father, she might be able to move the illustrious person, and so, in
time, the Government of England.

It was a delightful dream--the best she had imagined for many a day. She
was roused from it by the scream of a whistle, and the hoonch-hoonch of a
sternwheel steamer. A Government boat was hastening in to the bank,
almost opposite her house. She picked up the field-glass from the
window-sill behind her, and swept the deck of the steamer. There were
two figures in English dress, though one wore the tarboosh. The figure
shorter and smaller than the other she recognised. This was Donovan
Pasha. She need not write her letter to him, then. He would be sure to
visit her. Disapprove of him as she did from one stand-point, he always
excited in her feelings of homesickness, of an old life, full of
interests--music, drama, art, politics, diplomacy, the court, the
hunting-field, the quiet house-party. He troubled her in a way too,
for his sane certainty, set against her aspiring credulity, arrested,
even commanded, her sometimes.

Instinctively she put out her hand to gather in flying threads of hair,
she felt at the pearl fastening of her collar, she looked at her brown
shoes and her dress, and was satisfied. She was spotless. And never had