“Highness,” answered Dicky, “I have kith and kin in England. Shall a man forget his native land?” The Khedive yawned, lighted a cigarette, and murmured through the smoke: “Inshallah! It might be pleasant--betimes.” “I have your Highness’s leave to go?” asked Dicky. “May God preserve your head from harm!” answered Ismail in farewell salutation, and, taking a ring from his finger set with a large emerald, he gave it to Dicky. “Gold is scarce in Egypt,” he went on, “but there are jewels still in the palace--and the Khedive’s promises-to-pay with every money-barber of Europe!” he added, with a cynical sneer, and touched his forehead and his breast courteously as Dicky retired. Outside the presence Dicky unbuttoned his coat like an Englishman again, and ten minutes later flung his tarboosh into a corner of the room; for the tarboosh was the sign of official servitude, and Dicky was never the 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.