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 She put her arm round his shoulder.

"Why are you laughing?" she demanded quietly of me in French. "If he were a Christian dog he would have known many women, and he would be aware of the sizes of their feet. But he is only a clean Osmanli boy, and, as you see, I am the first woman he has ever seen, besides his mother."

It was a new Nashan: not the europeanized Nashan, with her foreign veneer, but a real woman, the one who had once said to me: "I am sure of the existence of Allah, because he manifests himself so quickly in me." Unmistakably at that moment God was manifesting Himself in her.

I rose to go. She rose, too, and so did the man, who had picked up his slippers and held them fast to his heart. He had not understood a word of the French that had passed between us.

"I bought you these because I thought maybe you would like them," he repeated.

"I like them very much indeed," she said, taking them from him.

"They are not so pretty, perhaps, as the ones you have on; but they are exactly like those my dead mother used to wear, when I was a little boy and played on her lap."

She listened to him attentively, deferentially, her eyes raised to his. Then she turned to me, who was already going.