Abd er-Rahman?
No; but Mohammed of Mequinez! Mohammed the Third! That's it! That's it!" So saying, and forgetting in his fury what he had said before of Mohammed himself, he laughed wildly, and beat about the patio from side to side like a caged and angry beast.
"And if I am a tyrant," he said in a thick voice, "who made me so?
If I oppress the poor, who taught me the way to do it?
Whose clever brain devised new means of revenue?
Ransoms, promissory notes, bonds, false judgments--what did I know of such things?
Who changed the silver dollars at nine ducats apiece?
And who bought up the debts of the people that murmured against such robbery?
Allah! Allah! Whose crafty head did all this?
Why, yours--yours--Israel ben Oliel! By the beard of the Prophet, I swear it!" Israel stood unmoved, and when these reproaches were hurled at him, he answered calmly and sadly, "God's ways are not our ways, neither are His thoughts our thoughts.

He works His own will, and we are but His ministers.

I thought God's justice had failed, but it has overtaken myself.

For what I did long ago of my own free will and intention to oppress the poor, I have suffered and still am suffering." All this time the Spanish wife of Ben Aboo had sat in the alcove with lips whitening under their crimson patches of paint, beating her fan restlessly on the empty air, and breathing rapid and audible breath.

And now, at this last word of Israel, though so sadly spoken, and so solemn in its note of suffering, she broke into a trill of laughter, and said lightly, "Ah! I thought your love of the poor was young.