Thus Ishmael was irresistible. There was nothing and nobody that seemed to have the power to touch him. *CHAPTER III* "To every sun its moon—to every man a woman." Wise and powerful as Ishmael was, people began to whisper that there was a woman who ruled him. He submitted everything to her judgment, and was guided and even governed by her counsel. Who was this woman? A Soudanese? No! An Egyptian? No! Rumour had it that she was a stranger, totally unknown to Ishmael down to the moment of his coming back to the Soudan—a Muslemah (Mohammedan lady) from India, the sister of a reigning prince of the Punjab, who having been educated under British rule, and therefore Western influences, had revolted against the captivity of the zenana, and broken away from her own people. Attracted by the fame of the new prophet as an emancipator of women and a reformer of bad Mohammedan customs, this woman had, according to report, followed him from Alexandria and Cairo to Khartoum, where she had settled herself, with a black boy as her servant, at the house of the Greek widow—the same who had formerly been the mistress of Ishmael’s first wife, Adila. The black boy called his mistress "the Lady," and most of the people about her knew her by the same name, but some called her the Sitt-el-beda, the Khatoun (the White Lady), and others the Emirah, and the Rani (the Princess, the Queen), in recognition of what they believed to be her rank and wealth. It was in the early days of Ishmael’s return to Khartoum, when women of all classes were coming to him unveiled, that he met with "the Princess" first. Sitting alone in the late afternoon on the bank of a broad stretch of land which was flooded by the high Nile, and looking across its glistening waters to where the sky was red behind the shattered dome of the Mahdi’s tomb in Omdurman, he saw a young and beautiful woman approaching him. She seemed to him to be a splendid creature under those southern skies—tall, well developed, with shining coal-black hair, long black lashes and brilliant eyes, and a mouth that was full of fire and movement. Her dress was such as is worn by Parsee ladies both in the East and in the West, having nothing more noticeably Oriental than a silken scarf which was bound about her head as a turban and a light, silver-edged muslin veil that fell back on her shoulders. She came up to him with a certain air of timidity, as of one who might be afraid to be thought immodest or perhaps of being recognised, yet with the proud bearing of a woman who had passed through life with a high step and would not shrink from any consequences. He rose to receive her, and she looked at him for a moment without speaking—almost as if she had for an instant lost the power of speech, being at last face to face with a man whom she had long thought of and long sought.