Babar sat up, leant his head on his hand and began to consider how matters stood. Oriental in mind, marriage was to him by no means synonymous with love. He could legitimately have four wives at a time. If he liked. But honestly he felt he would rather not. Still--as nothing possibly could prevent his making Ma'asuma his wife--if the other nameless lady wanted to be his wife also, he would acquiesce. He would not go back from his promise. Only--what a pity he had called her his "Moon"! That name belonged to his love by right.
So, as he sat dreaming, a voice said with the nasal twang of the common folk--
"A letter for the Presence."
The coincidence of time and place startled him. He looked up half-expectant of that tall, slim, female figure. But this was a lad in the uniform of the Palace servants. A message mayhap from one of the Begums. He took it carelessly from an awkward brown hand and opened its seal.
A scent of fresh violets came to him as he did so.
And the letter?
It was written in the finest Babari hand--the hand he had invented!--with a delicacy, an accuracy at which even the inventor of it marvelled, and it contained but a quatrain; but such a quatrain! Babar's scholastic appreciation of the form forced its way through his emotional delight at the words. Ali-Shîr himself could not have written anything neater, more absolutely correct in prosody. And in such difficult metre too, with its enlay of rhymes.
"My heart has part in this thy smart.
Dear heart! have part in this my smart!
Our sighs do rise twin to the skies;
Thy heart, my heart, are not apart."
And it was signed:
"Thy true friend Ma'asuma."