"You don't eat, father," he said.
"I am not hungry. Though the sun is up such a little while, it has contrived to give me a headache. I shall sleep it off. You want a sleep too, as your eyes are crying out."
"Not a bit of them, father. I could not sleep now; I want to go out and see this queer old place. I'll sleep all the better when I come back."
"Well, do so; but take care of the sun, and get one of the servants to go with you. You will find them about somewhere."
Grayson spoke with a dull, listless air, quite foreign to his brisk, energetic nature.
"He is very sleepy," Jack thought, as he put on his protective head-dress, and ran cheerfully down into the court.
He looked about for the servants, but could not see either of them. As he was standing there, an open door attracted his eye, and he could not help looking in. A woman was baking bread, in an oven consisting of a large round hole in the clay floor of the middle of the room. She was taking small pieces of dough from a lump beside her, slapping them on the inside of the oven, and promptly removing those already baked sufficiently. Two dark-eyed little boys were playing quietly at some game on the ground, and an older lad was standing beside her, talking, apparently about a bundle of cotton in a cloth which he held by the four corners.
Raising her eyes for a moment from her oven and her dough, the woman saw the stranger at the door. He did not know a word of Armenian, nor she a word of English, but she saluted him with great courtesy, bowing almost to the ground; then, as she rose slowly, touching her heart, her lips, and her forehead. The children did the same; the youngest acting his little part so prettily that Jack fell in love with him on the spot. As the woman, by signs, invited him to enter, he did so, and the children placed a cushion for him in the corner farthest from the door. The older boy brought him sherbet, flavoured and tinted with rosewater.
"This is all very nice," thought Jack. "Still, when one pays a visit one is expected to talk. And how can I talk to people who don't know a word of my language, nor I a word of theirs?"