Seeing that comment annoyed us, he ceased, and we fell to our bridge game; but more than once his eye fell on Aggie’s doily, and he muttered something about the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold.

II

The problem of Tufik’s future was a pressing one.  Tish called a meeting of the three of us next morning, and we met at her house.  We found her reading about Syria in the encyclopaedia, while spread round her on chairs and tables were numbers of silk kimonos, rolls of crocheted lace, shirt-waist patterns, and embroidered linens.

Hannah let us in.  She looked surly and had a bandage round her head, a sure sign of trouble—­Hannah always referring a pain in her temper to her ear or her head or her teeth.  She clutched my arm in the hall and held me back.

“I’m going to poison him!” she said.  “Miss Lizzie, that little snake goes or I go!”

“I’m ashamed of you, Hannah!” I replied sternly.  “If out of the breadth of her charity Miss Tish wishes to assist a fellow man—­”

Hannah reeled back and freed my arm.

“My God!” she whispered.  “You too!”

I am very fond of Hannah, who has lived with Tish for many years; but I had small patience with her that morning.

“I cannot see how it concerns you, anyhow, Hannah,” I observed severely.

Hannah put her apron to her eyes and sniffled into it.

“Oh, you can’t, can’t you!” she wailed.  “Don’t I give him half his meals, with him soft-soapin’ Miss Tish till she can’t see for suds?  Ain’t I fallin’ over him mornin’, noon, and night, and the postman telling all over the block he’s my steady company—­that snip that’s not eighteen yet?  And don’t I do the washin’?  And will you look round the place and count the things I’ve got to do up every week?  And don’t he talk to me in that lingo of his, so I don’t know whether he’s askin’ for a cup of coffee or insultin’ me?”

I patted Hannah on the arm.  After all, none of the exaltation of a good deed upheld Hannah as it sustained us.

“We are going to help him help himself, Hannah,” I said kindly.  “He hasn’t found himself.  Be gentle with him.  Remember he comes from the land of the Bible.”

“Humph!” said Hannah, who reads the newspapers.  “So does the plague!”

The problem we had set ourselves we worked out that morning.  As Tish said, the boy ought to have light work, for the Syrians are not a laboring people.

“Their occupation is—­er—­mainly pastoral,” she said, with the authority of the encyclopaedia.  “Grazing their herds and gathering figs and olives.  If we knew some one who needed a shepherd—­”

Aggie opposed the shepherd idea, however.  As she said, and with reason, the climate is too rigorous.  “It’s all well enough in Syria,” she said, “where they have no cold weather; but he’d take his death of pneumonia here.”