One morning, just as he was about to leave the bungalow, he heard Saidie’s voice calling him back.  He turned and saw her smiling face hanging over the stair-rail above him.  He remounted the stairs, and she drew him into their room.  Her face was radiant, her eyes blazed with light as she looked at him.

“I have something to tell you, Sahib!  I could not let you go without saying it.  Only think! is not Allah good to me?  I am to be the mother of the Sahib’s child,” and she fell on her knees, kissing his hands in a passion of joy.  Hamilton stood for the moment silent.  He was startled, unprepared for her words, unused to the wild joy with which the Oriental woman hails a coming life.

Her message carried a certain shock to him:  it augured change; and his happiness had been so perfect, so absolute, what would change, any change, even if wrought by the divine Hand itself, mean to him but loss?

Saidie, terrified at his silence, looked up at him wildly.

“What have I done?  Is not my lord pleased?” Her accent was one of the acutest fear.

Hamilton bent down and raised her to his breast.

“Dearest one, light of my soul, how could I not be pleased?” and he kissed her many times on the lips, and on the soft upper arm that pressed his throat, and on her neck, till even she was satisfied.

“Come and sit with me for a moment that I may tell you all,” she said.  Hamilton sat beside her on the bed, and she told him many things that an Englishwoman would never say, nor would it enter into her mind to conceive them.

Hamilton was greatly moved as he sat listening.  The wonderful imagery, the vivid language in which she clothed her pure joyous thoughts appealed to his own poetic, artistic habit of mind.

On his way across the desert to the city, Hamilton pondered deeply over the news and the girl’s unaffected joy.  Since all those whispered confidences poured into his ear while they sat side by side on the bed, the throb of jealousy he had first felt at her words had passed away.  Saidie had made it so clear to him that her joy was not so great at being the mother of a child as that she was to be the mother of his child, and similarly Hamilton felt in all his being a curious thrill at the thought that his child was hers, that this new life was created in and of her life that had become so infinitely dear to him.

He was glad now that his wife had refused to have a child.  The bitter pain he had felt then, those years ago, how little he had thought it was to be the parent of this present joy.  Now the woman he loved as he had loved no other would be the one to bear his child.  Still the thought of the suffering the mother would go through depressed his sensitive mind, and the idea of the risk to her life that came suddenly into his brain made him turn white to the lips as he rode in the hot sunlight.  Such intense happiness as he had known for the last three months