hankering for the life which she had led for a few years back, she had run off to return to it.
It was this action of mine, which probably gave rise to the legend that I had brought her to Cairo with me, where my wife arrived, "only to be confronted with a black wife after all her years of mental anxiety and sufferings." Why facts should be so persistently misconstrued, I cannot understand. In making that last — and I do not say final — effort, to do something for the woman to whom, at one time, I owed so much, I feel I have nothing to be ashamed of. Those who think differently must remember that it takes one some little time to fall again into European ideas and thoughts after twelve years of chains and slavery amongst the people whom I was compelled to associate with; and no one in the Soudan was more out of the world than I was.
