His prayers ended, he rose up slowly, once more spread out his hands in
ascription, and was about to enter the monastery, when, glancing towards
the west, he saw a horseman approaching. An instinct told him who it was
before he could clearly distinguish the figure, and his face lighted with
a gentle and expectant smile. Then his look changed.

"He is in trouble," he murmured. "As it was with his uncle in Damascus,
so will it be with him. Malaish, we are in the will of God!"

The hand that David laid in Ebn Ezra's was hot and nervous, the eyes that
drank in the friendship of the face which had seen two Claridges emptying
out their lives in the East were burning and famished by long fasting
of the spirit, forced abstinence from the pleasures of success and
fruition-haunting, desiring eyes, where flamed a spirit which consumed
the body and the indomitable mind. The lips, however, had their old
trick of smiling, though the smile which greeted Ebn Ezra Bey had a
melancholy which touched the desert-worn, life-spent old Arab as he had
not been touched since a smile, just like this, flashed up at him from
the weather-stained, dying face of quaint Benn Claridge in a street of
Damascus. The natural duplicity of the Oriental had been abashed and
inactive before the simple and astounding honesty of these two Quaker
folk.

He saw crisis written on every feature of the face before him. Yet the
scanty meal they ate with the monks in the ancient room was enlivened by
the eager yet quiet questioning of David, to whom the monks responded
with more spirit than had been often seen in this arid retreat. The
single torch which spluttered from the wall as they drank their coffee
lighted up faces as strange, withdrawn, and unconsciously secretive as