"I beg yours," came the instant reply. "I mistook you for a friend. Good-night!"
"Good-night!"
As he paced his horse on, choosing the longer way to Duryagunj, by the narrow lanes clinging to the city wall, the remembrance of that frank good-night lingered with him. For a friend! What a name to call Herbert Erlton! Poor little soul! The thought, by its very intolerableness, drove him back to the other, roused by her first words:
"Delhi dur ust."
True! Even this Delhi lying before his very eyes was far from him. How would it take the news which by now, as he had said, must have filtered through the bazaar? He could imagine that. He knew, also, that the Palace folk must be all discussing the Resident's garden party, with a view to their own special aims and objects. But what did they think of the outlook on the future? Did they also say Delhi dur ust?
One of them was saying it on a roof close by. It was Abool-Bukr, who, on his way home, had given himself the promised pleasure of retailing his virtuous afternoon's experiences to Newâsi; for his two-months-wed bride had not broken him of his habit of coming to his kind one, though it had made her graver, more dignified. Still she broke in on his thick assertion--for he had drunk brandy in his efforts to be friendly with the sahibs--that he had seen an Englishwoman of her sort, with the quick query:
"Like me! How so?"
He laughed mischievously. "And thou art not jealous of my wife!--or sayest thou art not! She was but like thee in this, aunt, that she is of the sort who would have men better than God made them----"
"No worse, thou meanest," she replied.
He shook his head. "Women, Newâsi, are as the ague. A man is ever being made better or worse till he knows not if he be well or ill. And both ways God's work is marred, a man driven from his right fate----"