Here Cecil and her pupil passed several quiet weeks. They did little exploring, for Cecil was not strong enough for it, and Azim Bey was deterred by fear of the jinn, but antiquities in abundance were brought to them to purchase by the Jews of the place, who spent their lives in searching for them. Azim Bey passed most of his time in his brother-in-law’s company, riding out with him to hunt, and assisting him to review his troops, to the intense amusement of Said Bey, who was a big jolly man, the son of an Irish renegade who had entered the Turkish service, and preserved some of the national characteristics even among his oriental surroundings. As for Cecil, she resigned herself to a thoroughly Eastern existence as a denizen of the harem, and became better acquainted with the manners and customs of its inhabitants than she had had opportunity to be during her stay in Baghdad. Said Bey’s mother was dead, as Naimeh Khanum informed her with evident relief and gratitude to Providence, and the household was therefore under the rule of the young wife, who was now much occupied with a wonderful baby son, of whom Azim Bey was intensely jealous, as he always was of every one and everything that interfered with the attention he conceived to be due to his imperious little self. The proud mother, who had herself enjoyed for a short time the advantage of the teaching of a European governess, was eager to consult Cecil as to the best way of educating her boy when he grew older, and many were the anxious discussions they held under the date-palms in the garden or in the evening on the terrace. Naimeh Khanum’s lovely face appeared on almost every page of Cecil’s sketch-book, only rivalled in popularity by endless studies of the great mounds of Babylon, seen under every possible variety of light and shade, and the English girl felt herself strangely drawn to the oriental, who looked out from her cage at the unknown world with eager inquisitive eyes. They used to spend hours in conversation, Cecil sketching, Naimeh Khanum busy with her baby, until the warning cry of “_Dastûr!_” announced the return of Said Bey, and Cecil would wrap her veil round her and retire to the temporary schoolroom, where her pupil would be waiting to tell her of the day’s adventures. CHAPTER XIII. INSTRUCTION AND INTROSPECTION. On the last evening of her stay at Hillah, Cecil became acquainted with an interesting fact concerning Azim Bey which at once touched and amused her. “A marriage had been arranged” for him long ago with Safieh Khanum, the little daughter of the Pasha of Mosul, and the wedding would take place when the bridegroom reached his eighteenth year. “My grandmother arranged it,” said Naimeh Khanum, playing with the bits of red stuff which were sewn to her baby’s cap to keep off the evil eye. “The Pasha is a man of the old school, and a very rigid Mussulman, and the Um-ul-Pasha thinks that Safieh Khanum will keep my brother back from becoming altogether a Frangi.”