Akbar gave a sigh of relief. He understood now. This woman had been in the conspiracy of silence; and she would have kept that silence until death.
"Sit thee down again, King's Châran," he said almost with a smile. "The King was not to know. Aye! but he does know, so silence is of no avail. He knows all--how the Luck was stolen for the Prince Salîm, and how he, deceiving his father----"
Âtma gave a little cry and crept closer, almost as it were consolingly, to his feet.
"He is but young, my liege, he did not think," she pleaded. "Truly he loves his father--there is no cause for pain----"
In the slight pause Akbar's eyes showed suspiciously as if they held sudden tears. "Not so spoke she who told me," he said, his voice bitter. "Yet she also was woman!"
Âtma's slow brain busy over that "she" broke in on the silence.
"Was't Khânzada Gulbadan or Umm Kulsum?" she asked naïvely.
Akbar frowned quickly. "I wist not they were in the scandal," he said quite petulantly. "But what matters it if all the world knew--save only the King! Leave that alone, for God's sake, and tell me truly what lay between thee and Ibrahîm?"
To him so near desire, that was the fateful question.
To her also, for dimly she saw ahead. "Silence is best," she said obstinately. "It does not injure Truth, whose hiding place is immortality, whose shadow, death."