“I will see My Lady first.... Trust me. I know what I’m doing. You will laugh as I do.” Laughter broke from his lips. It was as though his heart was ten years old. Dicky’s eyes moistened. He had never seen anything like it--such happiness, such boyish confidence. And what had not this man experienced! How had he drunk misfortune to the dregs! What unbelievable optimism had been his! How had he been at once hard and kind, tyrannical and human, defiant and peaceful, daring yet submissive, fierce yet just! And now, here, with so much done, with a great fortune and great power, a very boy, he was planning to win the heart of, and marry, his avowed foe, the woman who had condemned him without stint. II On her wide veranda, a stone’s-throw from the banks of the Nile, My Lady sat pen in hand and paper-pad upon her knee. She had written steadily for an hour, and now she raised her head to look out on the swift-flowing, muddy water, where broad khiassas floated down the stream, laden with bersim; where feluccas covered the river, bearing natives and donkeys; where faithful Moslems performed their ablutions, and other faithful Moslems, their sandals laid aside, said their prayers with their faces towards Mecca, oblivious of all around; where blue-robed women filled their goolahs with water, and bore them away, steady and stately; where a gang of conscripts, chained ankle to ankle, followed by a crowd of weeping and wailing women, were being driven to the anchorage of the stern-wheeled transport-steamer. All these sights she had seen how many hundred times! To her it was all slavery. The laden khiassas represented the fruits of enforced labour; the ablutions and prayers were but signs of submission to the tyranny of a religion designed for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, a creed and code of gross selfishness--were not women only admitted to Heaven by the intercession of their husbands and after unceasing prayer? Whether beasts of burden, the girl with the goolah, women in the harem, or servants of pleasure, they were all in the bonds of slavery, and the land was in moral darkness. So it seemed to her.