Dearest-One! It seemed almost too good to be true.--God save the man who had brought this happiness into his life!
Impatient, headstrong in all his emotions, he would gladly have cut short his reception and gone straight to her; but the people would not be denied a sight of their hero. If the angels were crying aloud "Enter in peace!" and the populace was shouting "God save the Emperor!" the least he could do was to listen to them patiently.
So it was nigh dusk before he found himself, trembling with sheer joy, in the Garden-Palace and saw before him a tall, slender figure in white--
"Dearest-One! Dearest-One!" he cried and was kissing her feet, her hands, her thin, worn face.
"Brotherling! Brotherling!"
That was all they said. And then they held back to see each other. She saw strength, and health, and manhood such as she had scarce dreamed of, even for him; a man of past thirty in the very prime of all things. And he saw a woman of nigh forty with streaks of silver in her dark hair, upright, tall, but with a weariness even in her joy.
"I am sorry, Dearest-One," he said humbly as he had said to her many a time when as a child he had grieved her.
"And I am glad," she replied softly.
That night the city seemed on fire. Flares blazed from every house, the flickering lines of countless lights seemed to interlock one street with another. Vast crowds surged through them, and far and wide rose Babar's praise.
But at the door of a mosque an old white-bearded mullah sat and spat calmly. "He wore the accursed red-cap of the schismatic--Wherefore?"