"It is because, Highness," she answered as if to a question, "the jeweller is arrived, and is even now on his way hither."
Akbar sprang to his feet, light as a boy. Dressed in hunting leathers with the close Mogul cap crested with a heron's plume, he looked not a day older, though his short hair above his beardless face had grown almost white.
"Here!" he cried, and even as he spoke a party of three or four showed rounding the rocky path.
A few minutes later Akbar stood holding the diamond, half its original size, but brilliant exceedingly in the hollow of his right hand.
"For my part," sniffed Auntie Rosebody, "I liked it better as it was. True, it dazzles the eyes, but to look at it much would be to court blindness. Lo! it gives me the browache. Come Ummu, let us on our way. I have promised Hamida, rhubarb-stew to her dinner and we must climb to the snows for that."
But Umm Kulsum lingered for consolation since, in truth, the stone bewildered her. "True, chachaji" (maternal uncle), she said softly, "I am not clever enough for it. There be so many sides, and each seemeth different."
Aye that was it! So many sides, thought Akbar, as, after dismissing the jeweller and his escort for refreshment, he sate on that pinnacle of rock almost overhanging the Panjab plain, and looked at the Luck which he had had cut in Western fashion.
His fowling piece--for he had been on his way to one of his long solitary rambles--lay beside him and on the polished steel of its lock the brilliant sunshine glinted, sending reflected light to touch and make visible the almost microscopic fruition of a tiny lichen on the rock.
But how much more brilliant was the light that sparkled from the diamond!
A hundred suns in one? No it was a hundred worlds--worlds unseen till then.