“Strictly speaking,” said Neforis meditatively, “Hiram is not one of our people.  He was a freedman of Thomas’ and came here with his daughter.  Every one speaks highly of his skill in the stable; but for this robbery we might have kept him for the rest of his life still, if the girl had ever taken it into her head to leave us and to take him with her, we could not have detained him.—­You may say what you will, and abuse me and mock me; I have none of what you call imagination; I see things simply as they are:  but there must be some understanding between that girl and the thief.”

“You are not to say another word of such monstrous nonsense!” exclaimed her husband; and he would have said more, but that at that moment the groom of the chambers announced that Gamaliel, the Jewish goldsmith, begged an audience.  The man had come to give information with regard to the fate of the lost emerald.

At this statement Orion changed color, and he turned away from the merchant as the slave admitted the same Israelite who had been sitting over the fire with the head-servants.  He at once plunged into his story, telling it in his peculiar light-hearted style.  He was so rich that the loss he might suffer did not trouble him enough to spoil his good-humor, and so honest that it was a pleasure to him to restore the stolen property to its rightful owner.  Early that morning, so he told them, Hiram the groom had been to him to offer him a wonderfully large and splendid emerald for sale.  The freedman had assured him that the stone was part of the property left by the famous Thomas, his former master.  It had decorated the head-stall of the horse which the hero of Damascus had last ridden, and it had come to him with the steed.

“I offered him what I thought fair,” the Jew went on, “and paid him two thousand drachmae on account; the remainder he begged me to take charge of for the present.  To this I agreed, but ere long a fly began to hum suspicion in my ear.  Then the police rushed through the town with the bloodhounds.  Good Heavens, what a barking!  The creatures yelped as if they would bark my poor house down, like the trumpets round the walls of Jericho—­you know.  ‘What is the matter now,’ I asked of the dog-keepers, and behold! my suspicions about the emerald were justified; so here, my lord Governor, I have brought you the stone, and as every suckling in Memphis hears from its nurse—­unless it is deaf—­what a just man Mukaukas George is, you will no doubt make good to me what I advanced to that stammering scoundrel.  And you will have the best of the bargain, noble Sir; for I make no demand for interest or even maintenance for the two hours during which it was mine.”