Too long had he held to the one, thinking that by recompense and restitution, by fair dealing and even-handed justice, he might atone to the other.

Recompense was a mockery of the sufferings which had led to death; restitution was no longer possible--his own purse being empty--without robbery of the treasury of his master; fair dealing and even justice were a vain hope in Barbary, where every man who held office, from the heartless Sultan in his hareem to the pert Mut'hasseb in the market, must be only as a human torture-jellab, made and designed to squeeze the life-blood out of the man beneath him.
To endure any longer the taunts and laughter of Ben Aboo was impossible, and to resist the covetous importunities of his Spanish woman, Katrina, was a waste of shame and spirit.

Besides, and above all, Israel remembered that God had given him grace in the sacrifices which he had made already.

Twice had God rewarded him, in the mercy He had shown to Naomi, for putting by the pomp and circumstance of the world.

Would His great hand be idle now--now when he most needed its mighty and miraculous power when Naomi, being conscious of her blindness, was mourning and crying for sweet sight of the world and he himself was about to put under his feet the last of his possessions that separated him from other men--his office that he wrought for in the early days with sweat of brow and blood, and held on to in the later days through evil report and hatred, that he might conquer the fate that had first beaten him down! Israel was in the way of bribing God again, forgetting, in the heat of his desire, the shame of his journey to Shawan.