"As it was with his uncle in Damascus, so will it be with him.

Malaish, we are in the will of God!" The hand that David laid in Ebn Ezra's was hot and nervous, the eyes that drank in the friendship of the face which had seen two Claridges emptying out their lives in the East were burning and famished by long fasting of the spirit, forced abstinence from the pleasures of success and fruition-haunting, desiring eyes, where flamed a spirit which consumed the body and the indomitable mind.

The lips, however, had their old trick of smiling, though the smile which greeted Ebn Ezra Bey had a melancholy which touched the desert-worn, life-spent old Arab as he had not been touched since a smile, just like this, flashed up at him from the weather-stained, dying face of quaint Benn Claridge in a street of Damascus.

The natural duplicity of the Oriental had been abashed and inactive before the simple and astounding honesty of these two Quaker folk.
He saw crisis written on every feature of the face before him.

Yet the scanty meal they ate with the monks in the ancient room was enlivened by the eager yet quiet questioning of David, to whom the monks responded with more spirit than had been often seen in this arid retreat.