"Sure it was so, mother," replied the stranger, surprised. "Dost know aught?"
"Know?" she echoed; "I know 'tis an old tale--an old tale."
"What is an old tale, mother?" asked the women eagerly, as, emboldened by the presence of the village spey-wife, they crowded round, eying the cake curiously.
She gave a scornful laugh, let the chupatti drop, and, rising to her feet, passed on to the tank. It suited her profession to be mysterious, and she knew no more than this, that once, or at most twice in her long life, such a token had come peacefully into the village, and passed out of it as peacefully with its message.
"Mai Dhunnoo knows something, for sure," commented a deep-bosomed mother of sons as the troop followed their "chaperone's" lead, closer serried than before, full of whispering surmise. "The gods send it mean not smallpox. I will give curds and sugar to thee, Mâta jee, each Friday for a year! I swear it for safety to the boys."
"He slipped in a puddle and cried 'Hail to the Ganges,'" retorted her neighbor, an ill-looking woman blind of one eye. She had been the richest heiress in the village, and was in consequence the wife of the handsomest young man in it; a childless wife into the bargain. "Boys do not fill the world, Veru; not even thine! Their welfare will not set tokens a-going. It needs some real misfortune for that."
"Then thy life is safe for sure," began the other hotly, when a peacemaker intervened.
"Wrangle not, sisters! All are naked when their clothes are gone; and the warning may be for us all. Mayhap the Toorks are coming once more--Mai Dhunnoo said 'twas an old tale. God send we be not all reft from our husbands."
"That would I never be," protested the heiress, provoking uproarious titterings among some girls.
"No such luck for poor Ramo," whispered one. "And she sonless too!"