As for Azim Bey, his silence did not arise from lack of interest in the matter. He knew as well as Charlie did when the first agreement lapsed, and throughout the tour from which they had just returned his mind had been busy on the subject. Over and over again, when he seemed merely to be contemplating the beauties of nature, or listening attentively to the morals which Cecil did her best to deduce for him from the various scenes and incidents of their daily life, he was occupied in planning schemes by which his governess’s further stay might be ensured. It was clear to him that the cardinal point was that Charlie should be absent from Baghdad when the agreement was signed. Azim Bey’s dislike for the surgeon of the Consulate was not a feeling of gradual growth, but had sprung up, fully matured, on the occasion of Charlie’s unauthorised intrusion into the harem. With a good deal of natural shrewdness, and a great deal of precocity, stimulated by the unchildlike life he had led, and the books in which he had delighted, the boy had divined Charlie’s secret, and marked him at once as an enemy. By catechising Cecil after all her visits to the Residency, he arrived at the knowledge that she always saw Dr Egerton there; and he remarked that she generally spoke of him with a sigh, but what this sigh meant he could not decide. In any case, he was fully persuaded that it would be far better for mademoiselle to remain with him for the next three years than to marry Dr Egerton. She was doing so much with her earnings for those brothers of hers (whom Azim Bey regarded with interest not unmingled with contempt, as creatures who existed for little else but to play pranks for his entertainment) that she certainly ought not to leave them in the lurch. He had never given a second thought to his loudly expressed intention of marrying her himself--which indeed had only been uttered in the hope of shocking his grandmother--and had resigned himself with philosophic indifference to the prospect of the bride who had been chosen for him; but he had some idea that when his education was finished, his father, or rather Jamileh Khanum, might find mademoiselle a suitable husband in some rich Armenian, so that she might continue to live in Baghdad, and he might consult her when he needed advice. In any case, Dr Egerton, who had unintentionally made himself peculiarly disagreeable to the Bey, was out of the question, and must be got rid of.