'I think I must have left my glasses over at the school. Will you be good enough to go and ask?'
'Now your Honour knows how we feel when we meet a man like that; and there are many such among the Franks,' my servant whispered in my ear as I went out obediently. 'By Allah, it is not to be endured!'
The parson occupied the only bedroom; and I slept out upon the balcony on his account. Yet he complained of certain of my garments hanging in his room, and flung them out. It was after that revolting episode, when I was really angry for a moment, that Rashîd came to me and said:
'You hate this hypocrite; is it not so?'
'By Allah,' I replied, 'I hate him.'
He seemed relieved by the decision of my tone, and then informed me:
'I know a person who would kill him for the sake of thirty English pounds.'
It became, of course, incumbent on me to explain that, with us English, hatred is not absolute as with the children of the Arabs—mine had already reached the laughing stage. He was evidently disappointed, and answered with a weary sigh:
'May Allah rid us of this foul oppression!'
It was a bitter pill for him, whose whole endeavour was for my aggrandisement, to see me treated like a menial by our guest; who, one fine evening, had me summoned to his presence—I had been sitting with some village elders in the olive grove behind the house—and made to me a strange proposal, which Rashîd declared by Allah proved his perfect infamy. His manner was for once quite amiable. Leaning back in a deck-chair, his two hands with palms resting on his waistcoat, the fingers raised communicating at the tips, he said, with clerical complacency: