’And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long like a hen.  What talk is yours of dower!  I was bought as though I had been a Lucknow dancing-girl instead of a child.’

‘Art thou sorry for the sale?’

’I have sorrowed; but to-day I am glad.  Thou wilt never cease to love me now?—­answer, my king.’

‘Never—­never.  No.’

’Not even though the mem-log—­the white women of thy own blood—­love thee?  And remember, I have watched them driving in the evening; they are very fair.’

’I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred.  I have seen the moon, and—­ then I saw no more fire-balloons.’

Ameera clapped her hands and laughed.  ‘Very good talk,’ she said.  Then with an assumption of great stateliness, ’It is enough.  Thou hast my permission to depart,—­if thou wilt.’

The man did not move.  He was sitting on a low red-lacquered couch in a room furnished only with a blue and white floor-cloth, some rugs, and a very complete collection of native cushions.  At his feet sat a woman of sixteen, and she was all but all the world in his eyes.  By every rule and law she should have been otherwise, for he was an Englishman, and she a Mussulman’s daughter bought two years before from her mother, who, being left without money, would have sold Ameera shrieking to the Prince of Darkness if the price had been sufficient.

It was a contract entered into with a light heart; but even before the girl had reached her bloom she came to fill the greater portion of John Holden’s life.  For her, and the withered hag her mother, he had taken a little house overlooking the great red-walled city, and found,—­when the marigolds had sprung up by the well in the courtyard and Ameera had established herself according to her own ideas of comfort, and her mother had ceased grumbling at the inadequacy of the cooking-places, the distance from the daily market, and at matters of house-keeping in general,—­that the house was to him his home.  Any one could enter his bachelor’s bungalow by day or night, and the life that he led there was an unlovely one.  In the house in the city his feet only could pass beyond the outer courtyard to the women’s rooms; and when the big wooden gate was bolted behind him he was king in his own territory, with Ameera for queen.  And there was going to be added to this kingdom a third person whose arrival Holden felt inclined to resent.  It interfered with his perfect happiness.  It disarranged the orderly peace of the house that was his own.  But Ameera was wild with delight at the thought of it, and her mother not less so.  The love of a man, and particularly a white man, was at the best an inconstant affair, but it might, both women argued, be held fast by a baby’s hands.  ‘And then,’ Ameera would always say, ’then he will never care for the white mem-log.  I hate them all—­I hate them all.’

‘He will go back to his own people in time,’ said the mother; ’but by the blessing of God that time is yet afar off.’