She had exchanged her cotton robe for one of silk, which was much more fitting, and as I looked down on her I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. If I had held the same opinion as to others of her sex I was not reminded of it then, and there was no manner of doubt that I was deeply in love with her. We walked long and talked much, and some of it was interesting. She told me, though it did not need the telling, that she was a lady and that she had risked her reputation and exposed herself to coarsest insult by appearing in public unveiled and dressed as a servant, out of love for her uncle and devotion to his cause. To prevent suspicion it had been determined that communication should be opened with me through a woman, and she had volunteered for the service. She said she had seen me at the Khedive’s reception, which she had witnessed through the fretwork from the apartments of the Khedivah--from which it appeared that I had been under consideration by the revolutionary leaders for several weeks before I was approached--and so she knew the man to whom the introductory note was to be delivered. The two women servants, who could not be trusted with such confidential correspondence, accompanied her for the double purpose of protecting her as much as possible and carrying out the peddling pretence. This explained why she had kept in the background and covered her face with her scraggly veil most of the time. On her first visit, she said, she had fully exposed her face so that I might see she was not of the class of her companions and be the more willing to hold commercial converse with her; in her heart she knew her beauty would attract me, wherein she displayed an abundantly justifiable confidence in her charms, but she expressed it without the words or style of vanity. Except for that brief period when she was altogether unveiled she said she really did not have great fear of being discovered, for it was unlikely that any of her friends would be around the hotel at the hours when she went there, and, even if they did see her, it was improbable that they would recognize her in fellahin attire. As a matter of fact, she confessed, as we became better acquainted, she had entered into the plot not only through love for her distinguished uncle, to whom she was devoted, but from a liking for doing things that were out of the ordinary.