We have all met fairly bad people with strikingly good faces, and perhaps fairly good people with strikingly bad faces; but when the eyes of a stranger who has no reason to love you are much nearer together than beauty demands, when his lips are thin, straight, and very close under his nose, moreover when he smiles at you with his mouth only and shows you even more politeness than the occasion requires, you must be more than simple-minded to put implicit trust in him. Lauriston noted these traits in Rahas, and mistrusted him accordingly. But the meeting itself being an adventure, and therefore welcome to a young man in love, he beamed with perfect good humour and began to apologise for his abrupt conduct on the night of his first visit. Rahas stopped him at once, smiling and waving the subject away as if to be flung over the rail of his own staircase by such a person as his visitor were the highest honour he could wish for. He, for his part, seeing this gentleman pass, could not resist the impulse which prompted him to open the door and beg him to enter, that he might apologise for his obtuseness in not instinctively recognising the gentleman as a person of high honour and distinction, incapable of any but the noblest motives, the most lofty conduct. He bowed to Lauriston, Lauriston bowed to him; they positively overflowed with civility, though from the sly black eyes of the Asiatic, and from the frank brown ones of the Englishman, there peeped out an easily discernible mutual antagonism. “Will this gentleman, whose name I have not the honour of knowing----” “My name is Lauriston,” said George, who knew that this cunning-looking person could easily find it out if he were to conceal it. “Will Mr. Lauriston,” continued the merchant with a bow, “do me the honour to smoke with me? I have narghilis, cigars, cigarettes, such as, if I may make the boast, you could not find in the palaces of your Prince of Wales.” “Thank you,” said Lauriston, who indeed felt some temptation to stay in the house, but had no fancy for his companion; “it is very kind of you to ask me, but I must be returning to my quarters. We soldiers, you know, are very strictly looked after in England.” The merchant smiled in a manner which implied that his ignorance of English manners and customs was not so limited as might have been inferred from his slow, pedantic speech, and his retention of the costume of his own country. “That strictness is, however, somewhat relaxed in the case of favoured officers--at least, they say so in Smyrna,” said he ingenuously. “But perhaps the real reason of Mr. Lauriston’s reluctance to accept my humble invitation is the feeling that to do so would be an unbecoming act of condescension from an English officer to a foreign tradesman.” “No, I assure you----”