This was a girl named Adila, a Copt, only twenty years of age, and by no means a voluptuous creature, but a little winsome thing, very sweet and feminine, always freshly clad, and walking barefoot on the hot sand with an erect confidence that was beautiful to see. Adila had been the daughter of a Christian merchant at Assouan, and there, six years before, she had been kidnapped by a Bisharin tribe, who, answering her tears with rough comfort, promised to make her a queen. In their own way they did so, for those being the dark days of Mahdism, they brought her to Omdurman and put her up to auction in the open slave-market, where the black eunuch of the Caliph, after thrusting his yellow fingers into her mouth to examine her teeth, bought her, among other girls, for his master’s harem. There, with forty women of varying ages, gathered by concupiscence from all quarters of the Soudan, she was mewed up in the close atmosphere of two sealed chambers in the Caliph’s crudely gorgeous palace, seeing no more of her owner than his coffee-coloured countenance as he passed once a day through the curtained rooms and signalled to one or other of their bedecked and be-ringleted occupants to follow him down a hidden stairway to his private quarters. At such moments of inspection Adila would sit trembling and breathless, in dread of being seen, and she found her companions only too happy to help her to hide herself from the attentions they were seeking for themselves. This lasted nearly a year, and then came a day when the howling in the streets outside, the wailing of shells overhead, and the crashing of cannon-ball in the dome of the Mahdi’s tomb, told the imprisoned women, who were creeping together in corners and clinging to each other in terror, that the English had come at last, and that the Caliph had fallen and fled. When Adila was set at liberty by the English Sirdar she learned that, in grief at the loss of their daughter, her parents had died, and so, ashamed to return to Assouan, after being a slave girl in Omdurman, she took service with a Greek widow who kept a bakery in Khartoum. It was there the Sheikhs of the law-courts found her, and they proceeded to coax and flatter her, telling her she had been a good girl who had seen much sorrow, and therefore ought to know some happiness now, to which end they had found a husband to marry her, and he was a fine handsome man, young and learned and rich. At this Adila, remembering the Caliph, and thinking that such a person as they pictured could only want her as the slave of his bed, turned sharply upon them and said, "When did I ask you to find me a man?" and the Sheikhs had to go back discomfited.