One evening, Lady Hester was informed that the pacha awaited her. Rash enterprise for a woman who had a soul less firm. She passed with an assured step--with an assured stride--through the ante-chambers of the palace, where the flames of the torches shone on the weapons of the soldiers and the motionless guards. She entered an immense hall, walking through a double hedge of officers and janissaries in full dress, naked scimitars in their hands. Silence terrible and oppressive. The steel threw flashes of light. And, at the very end, on a sofa of crimson satin, a little man with an air haughty and glacial, who, without rising, signed to her to be seated. Lady Hester was in no way disconcerted, and all these glances of men, ardent and sombre, did not displease her. By her side stood the Jew Malem Rafael--brother of Malem Hazm--and M. Bertrand. Little Giorgio, who had been brought to check the translations of the interpreters, had been stopped at the door because he carried arms, a discourtesy as notorious as to wear boots on an official visit in England. M. Bertrand was far from being as much at his ease as was his intrepid mistress. He would certainly have preferred to be the other Bertrand, he who was travelling on the road to Aleppo; his teeth chattered with fear, and he was a long time before being able to speak intelligibly. Lady Hester presented Sayd Soliman Pacha with a very valuable snuff-box, and withdrew at the end of a reasonable time, which seemed mortally long to her interpreter. The pacha sent her a horse shortly afterwards. After all these visits, her stable was beginning to be supplied. Scarcely had she returned, when her janissary Mohammed said to her: "Her ladyship's reception has been great." "Yes, but all that is only vanity," answered she. "Oh, my lady!" cried he, delighted, "thou bearest on thy forehead the splendour of a king and the humility of a dervish at the bottom of thy heart." The doctor made the round of the harems of the town to physic the beautiful Turkish women. Every day his house was besieged by blind men imperiously demanding eyes; consumptives, a lung; lame men, a straight leg; hunchbacks, a flat back. Most of the time, these patients desired to catch a glimpse of Lady Hester, and, their curiosity satisfied, they went to throw into the Barada the doctor's powders. But he had sick persons more serious. Ahmed Bey, of one of the most important families of the town, son of Abdallah, ex-Pacha of Damascus, sent for him to attend his son, a little boy of thirteen, ugly, rickety and deformed, and afflicted with an intermittent fever. All the resources of the Damascene medical art had been employed without effect. He had been sewn up in the skin of a sheep which had just been flayed; he had swallowed powdered pearls; he had had his feet covered by still warm pigeons. All without result.