If any eyes less dim than old Mahmud’s had been there at that moment they would have seen a look of triumph in the lady’s face which she vainly struggled to conceal. But at the next moment it was full of humility and gratitude as she bowed herself out and promised to come again the following day. Hardly had the lady gone when Ishmael’s simple nature began to recover itself from the spell of her sex and beauty, but the old uncle’s admiration was quite ungovernable, and he began to hint at the possibility of yet more intimate relations between his nephew and the devoted young Muslemah. "I have always told you that you ought to marry again, a good woman and a believer," he said; whereupon Ishmael, with the ecstasy created by "the Princess’s" loveliness still shining in his eyes, answered— "No! I have always said, ’No, no, by Allah! One wife I had, and though she was a Christian and had been a slave I loved her, and never, never shall another woman take her place.’" "Ah, well, God knows best what to do with us," said the old man. "But life is a passing shadow and youth a departing guest." Next morning the white lady came according to appointment, and Ishmael set her to read some European newspapers containing accounts of recent doings in Cairo. She was translating these newspapers aloud when Ishmael’s little daughter Ayesha came bounding into the house, followed by her nurse, the Arab woman Zenoba—the child barefoot as her mother used to be, and with her mother’s beautiful, erect confidence as she moved about, lightly clad, with her middle small-girt by a scarlet sash over her pure white shirt—the woman in her blue habarah and with a silver ring in her nose. Ishmael presented both of them to the lady, whereupon the child, by an instinctive impulse, ran over to her and kissed her hand and held it, but the Arab woman only bowed with a look of suspicion, and, as long as she remained in the guest-room, continued to watch out of the sidelong slits of her eyes. The Arab woman’s obvious mistrust made more impression upon Ishmael than his daughter’s spontaneous liking, for as soon as he was alone with the lady again he began to talk to her of the gravity of the task he had undertaken, and of the need for caution and even secrecy with respect to all his doings. The lady’s brilliant eyes glistened under their long black lashes as she listened to him, and she answered his warnings with assuring words, until, coming to closer quarters, he proposed that for his people’s sake rather than his own she should take an oath of fidelity to him and to his cause. At that she looked startled, and could with difficulty conceal her agitation. And when he went on to recite the terms of the oath to her—solemn terms, taking God and His prophet to witness that she would never reveal anything which came to her knowledge within the walls of that house—she seemed to be stifling with a sense of fear or shame.