CHAPTER VII.
THE ANGEL IN ISRAEL'S HOUSE When Israel had been some twenty years at Tetuan, Naomi being then fourteen years of age, Ben Aboo, the Basha, married a Christian wife.
The woman's name was Katrina.

She was a Spaniard by birth, and had first come to Morocco at the tail of a Spanish embassy, which travelled through Tetuan from Ceuta to the Sultan at Fez.

What her belongings were, and what her antecedents had been, no one appeared to know, nor did Ben Aboo himself seem to care.

She answered all his present needs in her own person, which was ample in its proportions and abundant in its charms.
In marrying Ben Aboo, the wily Katrina imposed two conditions.

The first was, that he should put away the full Mohammedan complement of four Moorish wives, whom he had married already as well as the many concubines that he had annexed in his way through life, and now kept lodged in one unquiet nest in the women's hidden quarter of the Palace.
The second condition was, that she herself should never be banished to such seclusion, but, like the wife of any European governor, should openly share the state of her husband.
Ben Aboo was in no mood to stand on the rights of a strict Mohammedan, and he accepted both of her conditions.